


modern love

by stillscape



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Mutual Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-02
Updated: 2018-11-07
Packaged: 2019-05-17 04:58:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 60,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14825711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stillscape/pseuds/stillscape
Summary: Beneath the headline, beneath the cartoonish illustration of a girl with a ponytail and a boy with a beanie seated across from one another at a desk, he sees the wordsBy Elizabeth Cooper.It is, he tells himself, a very common name. But what if…What if.Or: The one where Jughead finds out the past wasn't exactly what he thought... via theNew York Times"Modern Love" column.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> From a prompt by lovelee: "betty, somewhere around age 30, writes this sweet, wistful Modern Love piece for the NYT and doesn’t name names but jughead reads it and knows it’s about him and reaches out after they’ve been estranged for like 6 years or whatever and dot dot dot…"
> 
> In the spirit of the actual [_New York Times_ "Modern Love" series](https://www.nytimes.com/column/modern-love), Betty's essay is written in first person. I promise the rest of the fic is not. I usually nope out of first person fics too, but bear with me here.

**MODERN LOVE: Embracing My First Love, Clichés and All**

By Elizabeth Cooper  
  
  
Last Christmas, my sister asked me to tell her about my first love. 

“That’s a loaded question,” I said in response. 

Polly tilted her head to the side, sending her long, straight hair cascading over the edge of one of the juvenile headbands she’d never given up. She arched her eyebrow in a way that clearly communicated _no, it’s not_. She was, admittedly, tipsy on eggnog. She was also holding my high school senior yearbook, its pages opened to a picture of the staff of our student newspaper. 

I don’t see my sister very often. We were close, growing up. She’s only two years older than I am, and even though she remained half a head taller until we reached high school, the occasional person still mistook us for twins. Our parents dressed us near-identically, too: perfect pastel cardigans, primly pleated skirts. We were quite possibly the last children in America to have designated “play clothes,” and even those, we knew, were meant to be kept clean. 

But then we did reach high school. I remained the awkward cliché I always had been: the polite, proper, perfect daughter. I was always on the honor roll, always ready to lend a helping hand, and always, as I had been since the age of eleven, deeply infatuated with the All-American boy next door. 

Polly got pregnant (with twins!) by the son of our father’s sworn mortal enemy, married him, dropped out of high school, and ran away to live in a wooded enclave that she claims is a commune but which I have always believed to be a cult, in that order. She and her husband live there still with their children, now thirteen. She has never had any regrets. 

I, on the other hand, have so many that I wear them on my skin: crescent-shaped scars, years of worries dug into my palms and left there. 

My sister licked her thumb and rifled through the yearbook until she got to the individual headshots. Our hometown is small enough that the boy next door and I, he an “A” and I a “C,” respectively, are shown on the same page. Polly read his inscription to me aloud. It was wholly platonic, but sincere and embarrassing in a way that only teenage boys who believe you can change the world with an acoustic guitar can be. 

“Do you ever regret not telling him?” Polly asked. “He’s the one who got away, Betty, and he didn’t have to be.” 

I blinked once. Twice. 

“No,” I told her, honestly. 

Thirteen years after the fact, Polly demanded a thorough postmortem, which I will spare the readers of this essay. Suffice to say that, despite the kismet of my newly earned cheerleading uniform and his newly earned varsity jacket, the boy next door never noticed what I then saw as our clear compatibility. When he fell in love with the new girl in school, I cried for a week, picking my palms to shreds as I stood in front of my bedroom mirror and wondered, despairingly, what parts of myself I was supposed to improve _now_. 

Polly sighed deeply, and the dreamy look she gets before she’s about to say something completely insane came into her eyes; this time, it was “I think you should have told him anyway; you never know what might have happened.” 

I excused myself, took the yearbook from her hands, and went to bed. Upstairs, with the door of my childhood bedroom safely locked (Polly’s twins, having been raised in a “commune,” are sometimes fuzzy on the notion of personal space), I turned back to the page that showed the newspaper staff. 

I’m in the center of the photo, and in my jeans, simple sweater, and ponytail, look younger than my eighteen years. _The Blue and Gold_ was my baby, though, and my expression is defiant, even proud; the student paper was never a cool extracurricular, but it was always the one I loved best. I’m perched on the edge of a large wooden desk and surrounded by my small staff of writers. The fingers of one hand are curled around a ballpoint pen the photographer had insisted I hold, as though to prove I really was the editor-in-chief. My other hand rests slightly behind me, on the desk. 

To me, it has always looked as though I’m reaching for a boy who isn’t there. 

The boy who isn’t there is the one I regret not telling. 

When I think of that newspaper office, I think of the ancient, grumpy computers we were forced to use for layout, the ones that crashed every time we tried to open InDesign and steadfastly refused to stay connected to the printer. I think of the dust that always seemed to be suspended, dreamlike, in the streaks of sunlight created by the heavy wooden blinds that didn’t quite close. But most of all, I think of him, slouched in a chair with his feet on a desk and one hand in a bag of store-brand tortilla chips. 

“This is your best investigative piece yet, Betty,” he’d say every time, knowing I still secretly fancied myself a real Nancy Drew. The compliment was inevitably followed by some sarcastic remark pertaining to the article at hand. 

I always knew, though, which one he meant more sincerely. 

To this day, I’m not sure why I never said anything to him; goodness knows I had the chance, with as many hours as we spent working on the paper together. Perhaps it was because he knew about my previous crush--everyone did, I think--and the boy next door just so happened to be his best friend. Perhaps it was because I realized I wanted to kiss him at the same moment I realized he’d become _my_ best friend, and although I prided myself on being able to untangle the deepest mysteries our sleepy small town had to offer, I couldn’t do the same for my own feelings. I only knew that to kiss him, or to tell him that I wanted to, would mean risking our peaceful camaraderie, and that was something I simply could not do. 

Besides, _his_ feelings were impossible to discern. He wore them close to the chest and against his skin, kept them buried under flannel shirts and hoodies and sherpa jackets. Sometimes he tied them up even closer, with a pair of ancient and, frankly, ridiculous suspenders. Then there was the hat, a gray hand-knit beanie that never left his head--not even in summer--and about which everyone knew better than to ask; lord only knew what he kept hidden under there, save for the unruly dark hair that, by the end of sophomore year, I was desperate to run my hands through. 

I knew that when he looked at me, _really_ looked, I didn’t feel like a broken porcelain doll patched tentatively together with Superglue. I didn’t feel like the girl who ran home from cheerleading practice only to do additional cheerleading practice, lest no one catch on to the fact that she was a fraud. I felt, simply, like a person worth knowing. 

But I didn’t know how he felt when he looked at me. So I waited, saying nothing. 

At the end of our junior year, as we locked up the newspaper office for the last time, he stared at my hands on the doorknob, cleared his throat, and softly said, “My mom’s finally divorcing my dad.” 

This wasn’t entirely unexpected--I knew things had been rocky for years--but his next words were. 

His next words were, “We’re moving to Ohio.” A week later, he was gone. His father remained here, but if he ever came to visit, I wasn’t aware of it. 

He wasn’t my first love. But I’ve always wondered if he could have been. 

Ten years have passed since we graduated from high school. We promised to stay in touch, but didn’t, and I’ve seen him only once since: six years ago, at his father’s funeral, hardly the time or place to let old feelings simmer to the surface. Despite the unfortunate circumstances, he looked good--less wary than he had been at sixteen, less likely to jump out of his skin if you snuck up on him from behind. Moving away had been good for him. 

After the funeral, we got burgers at the town’s old diner, he and the boy next door and I, and we talked about what we planned to do after college--move to New York City, all of us, although in the end I was the only one who did. Something he said seemed to insinuate that he had a girlfriend, though I can’t remember now what that was. Again, we promised to keep in touch; again, we failed to follow through. 

New York and I, we didn’t work out. She was too big, too chaotic, too expensive. I upgraded my bachelor’s degree to a master’s and returned to my hometown. I don’t regret moving to the city, and I don’t regret coming home. My true first love, I’ve realized, is not a person but a place: the high school newspaper office in which I learned how to be myself. This is all a high school cliché in itself, I know, but I’ve made my peace with that. 

On the day after Christmas, I took my “alternatively-educated” niece and nephew to see the school, and they walked down the halls of Riverdale High as though exploring an alien planet on which they’d crash-landed. They’re smart kids, and I know they’re doing fine; Dagwood has an encyclopedic knowledge of medicinal herbs, and Juniper already does math at a college level. But in that moment, I felt sad for them--sad that they’ll never know the particular, exquisitely painful heartbreaks of high school. 

I advise _The Blue and Gold_ staff now, staying late in the afternoons after I’m done teaching my students _Romeo and Juliet_ or _The Catcher in the Rye_. We talk about the school’s sports teams; we talk about digital photography and the future of print journalism; we talk about the advantages and disadvantages of semi-colons. Sometimes I buy them tortilla chips from the vending machine, even though I’m not supposed to. I think--I _hope_ \--that they’re a little less lonely every time they leave, as I was. 

And I wonder where the boy who isn’t there is today. I don’t expect him to read this, and I don’t expect he’s particularly interested in catching up with me after all these years. But if he does, and he is… well, he knows where to find me.

____________________________________ 

  
  
  
In Toledo, Ohio, in the offices of a small independent weekly still stubbornly refusing to go out of business like all the others, Jughead Jones closes his browser tab and pushes his chair back a few inches from the desk.

He can’t breathe.

  
  
  
(to be continued...)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big thank-yous to heartunsettledsoul and village_skeptic for looking this one over for me.

Every single life is composed of a series of what-ifs. Jughead knows this. But his own often feels like it’s contained more what-ifs than most. _Bigger_ what-ifs than most. 

What if, for instance, his father hadn’t been a drunk? 

What if his parents had been able to make it work? 

What if, when his mother had finally had enough, he’d followed his gut instinct? What if he had demanded to stay with said drunk father, in Riverdale? 

So many times, F.P. had sworn he would get sober for his family. What if, _what if_ , Jughead staying behind might have helped him do it? What if he had been there on that fateful November night, six (almost seven, now) years ago, when F.P. got into his truck with a blood alcohol content twice the legal limit, and came out of it in a body bag? It was the weekend of Thanksgiving; Jughead would have been home from college, and…

  
  


But then, there are the other what-ifs: what if he’d stayed in Riverdale and fallen down the same path as his father? What if he’d joined the Serpents instead of going to college? What if he’d gotten stuck in the same cursed Jones spiral, and doomed himself to an unaccomplished life in the same shitty trailer in which the first and second of his name had lived and died?

And now, on this particular Friday morning, the week before his twenty-ninth birthday, _what if_ he had gone to bed at a reasonable hour the night before instead of staying up to work on his novel, thus resulting in him sleeping through his alarm and not having time to do anything other than throw on clothes and comb his hair before leaving for work? What if he hadn’t been so very, very desperate to get started on his daily gallon of coffee before he sat down at his desk?

  
  


“What if,” Toni says, tossing her long pink hair over her shoulder, “ _what if_ the _New York Times_ didn’t feel compelled to publish every sad sack, heteronormative, small-town-white-girl-can’t-hack-it-in-the-big-city quote-unquote ‘love story’ they came across?” 

“Hmm?” Jughead replies, halfheartedly at best. She’s reading on her phone in the break room; he’s halfway through the second donut he pulled from the communal box, and waiting with increasing impatience for a fresh pot of coffee to finish brewing. 

“Today’s ‘Modern Love’ column,” she clarifies, leaving Jughead slightly confused; he reads the "Modern Love" column every so often, and generally finds it among the least heteronormative sections of the paper. Uncomfortably frank and introspective, sure, but he kind of enjoys the navel-gazey aspects. 

Toni secretly likes those aspects too, he knows. The two of them are birds of at least a few shared feathers, including the somewhat irritating trait of being equal parts jaded cynic and hopeless romantic. But while she externalizes the trait, dating both women and men with wild, reckless abandon and publicly dissecting the inevitable blowups in a semi-regular relationship column for the paper, Jughead internalizes it. In the three years since he joined this newspaper, he’s dated only one person: Toni, in an affair that was a whirlwind even by her standards, lasting less than twenty-four hours. They had mutually and mercifully agreed to never speak of it again. (She had, thank goodness, kept him out of her column.) 

And it’s not that he doesn’t _want_ to date. In theory, he does. Sometimes he thinks he wants nothing more than to have that kind of connection. But for whatever reason, he’s been unable to pull any kind of trigger with anyone he meets lately, either physically or emotionally. His sister’s been on his case about going back into therapy, and deep down, he knows she’s right. But he hasn’t been able to pull the trigger on that either. 

He grants Toni a noncommittal “huh,” which she seems to take as a sign that he is, in fact, interested in hearing her complain further.

“So this girl’s deal...” she starts. Jughead turns his auditory focus to the coffee pot, and keeps it there until the steady _drip drip drip_ finally ceases and he can pour himself a cup. 

When he gets to his desk, armed with his coffee and a third donut, he discovers that Toni’s sent him the link. And, since he’s in no particular hurry to open any of the emails that actually have to do with work, he clicks on it. 

He immediately forgets about the coffee, and shoves almost the entire donut into his mouth, swallowing quickly in an effort to force his heart back down his throat. 

Beneath the headline, beneath the cartoonish illustration of a girl with a ponytail and a boy with a beanie seated across from one another at a desk, he sees the words _By Elizabeth Cooper_. 

It is, he tells himself, a very common name. But what if…

What if.

  
  


He’s always intended to go back to Riverdale some day, just to revisit it. 

_Some_ day. In the future. Someday, in the distant future, when everyone he’d known is either gone or too old, too changed, to recognize. When his father’s gravestone has finally acquired its inevitable patina of moss. When he’s published his novel, at the very least; though he’d never admit it out loud, there is a part of Jughead that very much wants to have a signing at Riverdale’s only bookstore, to scowl politely at Reggie Mantle and his ilk, to wordlessly say _see._ Not even _see, you were wrong_. Just, _see_. 

Not that he imagines Reggie Mantle has become the kind of guy who goes to book signings, of course. Not that he even knows if Reggie Mantle still lives in Riverdale. 

But how often has he imagined what if, _what if_ , he’d been brave enough to kiss Betty Cooper? 

Still breathless, he clicks the link again, opening her essay in a new tab for a second time. It’s somehow harder to read when he already knows what it says. But he makes himself do it; he makes himself read every single word over again, hearing each one aloud in his head in the memory of Betty’s voice, until he gets to the last paragraph.

_And I wonder where the boy who isn’t there is today. I don’t expect him to read this, and I don’t expect he’s particularly interested in catching up with me after all these years. But if he does, and he is… well, he knows where to find me._

Well, he thinks, he _did_ read it. The only reason he’s been uninterested in catching up with Betty is that he’s always assumed she was uninterested in catching up with him. He, too, has sense memories of the old school newspaper office that are so strong they feel almost fake, implanted by Delos Incorporated. He thinks, still, about the horrible computers, the dust they could never vanquish, and those wooden blinds that were permanently stuck somewhere between open and closed. 

But most of all, of course, he remembers her: endlessly pacing in front of that window, with a printed draft in one hand and a pen in the other, her face betraying exactly what she thought of a given sentence even though she never once gave discouraging feedback. 

(That wasn’t strictly true. He remembers the time he’d had to write an assignment all too quickly—why he left it to the very last minute, he can no longer recall—and when Betty first read it, her eyes widened so far he feared they might fall out of her head. 

“This is _terrible_ , Juggie,” she’d said, not without affection. Then she’d given him the red ink-covered rough draft and her million-dollar smile. “But you can make it great. I know you can.”) 

So yes, he knows where to find her. 

And he’s in Toledo now. But he’s got a month or more of vacation days saved up, having thus far never found a reason to use them, and a couple of friendly-warning emails from the one-woman human resources department: _take these, or else_. 

He’s in Toledo now. But he doesn’t have to be. 

What if, _what if_ , he wasn’t? 

  
  


He’s out of the office early, two weeks’ vacation requested and approved effective immediately, and by five o’clock, he is officially on the road. 

Though he hasn’t worn it in years, his old gray beanie is stuffed at the bottom of his bag. Just in case.

  
  


Ever since his dad first taught him to ride, Jughead has loved motorcycles. 

He was fourteen then, too young to learn in the eyes of both the law and his mother. Somewhat naively, Jughead had assumed F.P. had cleared the lessons with Gladys; he hadn’t, of course, and though Gladys’s instinct was always to swallow her anger and let it digest until it ate through her intestines, when she discovered what her husband and teenage son had been up to, she tore into both of them with the full force of all her repressed fury. Truly, there were no metaphors too mixed to describe the situation. 

After Gladys’s explosion, they simply became better at hiding their activities. But then F.P. had bought him a used, oversized leather jacket for his sixteenth birthday and taken him to get his junior license, and all hell broke loose once again. 

Though the beginning of the end of his parents’ marriage was most likely the day they got married in the first place, and though it would be another year before Gladys finally followed through on her long-standing threat to leave, Jughead’s always felt that his sixteenth birthday was the day things _really_ started going to shit.

(“As if I didn’t have enough reasons to hate my birthday already,” he’d ranted at poor Betty the next day. Her only crime had been to bring two dozen cupcakes to the newspaper office—twenty-three unmarked, one emblazoned with a little yellow icing Basquiat crown—but she was, as ever, perfectly willing to absorb the full force of his venting.) 

Safety concerns aside, his mother’s real problem had been not the motorcycle license. Rather, it was the jacket, and what the jacket represented. The leather was unembellished, and F.P. swore it was only for safety purposes, but Gladys couldn’t see it without imagining that it would one day bear a patch depicting a large green snake with yellow eyes. 

And though in the heat of the moment, Jughead had raged at his mother that she couldn’t possibly be more wrong, well… 

He’d already started to notice that although his father had always claimed he did not want Jughead to follow in his footsteps, he’d also begun mentioning Serpent business more often, had started hinting Jughead ought to transfer to Southside High to be “closer to home” even though Riverdale High was only three miles from Sunnyside Trailer Park, had even once wrapped up what was supposed to be a fun weekend ride for just the two of them by making Jughead follow him to an actual gang meeting. 

Slowly, Jughead stopped riding with his father, though he continued to borrow the bike on the occasions he needed to get away faster than his legs could carry him. 

Gladys wouldn’t let him buy his own bike after they moved, a prohibition she did not need to make; they couldn’t have afforded one anyway. He learned to live without. He’d learned—was learning—to live without worse. And so Jughead had not ridden for years. Not until his father died, the Riverdale authorities determined him F.P.’s next of kin, and he found out in the worst way possible that he was now the proud owner of a surprisingly well-maintained vintage motorcycle. 

“You ought to sell that,” his mother had said, her tone somewhere between dismissive and exhausted. But the part of Jughead that had once drawn two stick figures in crayon on a piece of construction paper, glued macaroni all over the page, and proudly presented it as a Father’s Day gift found he simply couldn’t. 

Six years later, he still has the motorcycle. 

(He has the macaroni art, too. He’d found it carefully stashed in his father’s bedside table, and unlike ninety-five percent of the papers in the trailer, it was pristine: no crumpled corners, no dried sweat rings indicating it had ever been used as a beer coaster.) 

Though it’s been more than six years since he’s had the threat of being indoctrinated into a gang hanging over him, Jughead still doesn’t love most of the culture that surrounds motorcycles, which so often seems to embody the worst kind of toxic masculinity. But he still loves the feeling of being on a bike, with the drag tearing at his limbs even through the old leather jacket that now fits perfectly. 

There’s a sort of blissful solitude in the act of riding that he sometimes craves so much it becomes a physical hunger, insatiable until he’s out there on the open road. The cliché is writers getting their best ideas in the shower; Jughead gets his when he’s on the bike, wind rushing hard past his ears until it turns to white noise. The genesis of his first published short story came to him while he was riding. And although he often wishes the landscape around Toledo was more dramatic, more inspiring, he’s yet to find a better way to clear his mind. 

Today, though, his mind never quiets completely.

  
  


Afternoon stretches into evening. Jughead stops for dinner and gas outside of Cleveland and is on the road again in under half an hour. He crosses the state line into Pennsylvania an hour or so later, decides to go just a little further, and stops for the night at a cheap motel in Erie. He takes a long, hot shower to wash off the road grime. Then he settles on the bed with his laptop, intending to work on his novel. 

Instead, he types _What exactly do I think is going to happen here?_ into a blank Word document and contemplates the sentence for a while. No additional words occur to him, so he signs on to the motel’s crappy wi-fi and opens Betty’s essay again. 

It says so much, and yet, there’s so much it doesn’t say. 

Jellybean had been with them at Pop’s, after the funeral, a fact either Betty or her editor had chosen to omit. He and Betty and Archie _had_ kept in touch after he’d moved to Toledo, for the first year at least; it was the start of college, that definitive new phase in their lives, that really did them in, as Betty became somehow even busier than she’d been in high school and Jughead, exposed for the first time to leftist social theory, had deleted all his social media accounts in a fit of anticapitalist pique. 

(He’s reinstated Twitter, but under the Serious Author pen name he’d gotten bullied into adopting when his first short story was accepted: J.F. Zielinski. He personally finds the combination of his nickname, his legal given name, and his mother’s maiden name somewhat inelegant—at least, it’s sounded stupid on the few occasions he’s needed to explain what the J.F. stands for—but not even he had _really_ wanted to go by “Jughead” in a literary context, and he’d been strongly advised against using the simpler and more truthful “J. Jones” on the grounds that no one would ever be able to Google him accurately.) 

It hits him, too, that the essay gives no indication of whether or not Betty’s single now. He _thinks_ , reading it, that she is, but that might not be the case. She could be happily married, for all he knows. She could have kids. 

And yet…

And yet, there’s no denying that the essay contains an invitation to him. To him, pointedly and specifically. A platonic invitation, to be sure, but an invitation nevertheless. 

He gets a flash of what could be: the two of them on opposite sides of a booth at Pop’s, him with black coffee and fries, her with a vanilla milkshake, discussing their adult lives over vestiges of childhood as they’d done after his father’s funeral. Or the two of them, rehashing the past in the _Blue and Gold_ office over sodas and chips from the student lounge’s vending machine. Though he’s sure that the computers must be newer now and that Betty, who is nothing if not a devoted hanger-upper of posters, must have updated the decor at least a little in her time as advisor, he can’t help but imagine the room exactly the way that it was. 

Both scenarios sound nice. 

But then, spending time with Betty is always nice. Spending time with Betty has never been anything but nice. When so many things in Jughead’s life had not been nice—when he’d felt like nothing so much as a foot in a wet wool sock, shoved inside a shoe that didn’t quite fit, blistering with every step he took—spending time with her was nice. Even after F.P.’s funeral, it had been nice. 

(What if, _what if_ , he’d followed through with his promise to keep in touch? What if he hadn’t spent so much time researching apartment prices in New York City that he’d eventually convinced himself he was doomed to failure there no matter what, and talked himself out of giving it a shot?) 

He reads the essay yet again, this time stopping on the lines _I knew that when he looked at me, really looked, I didn’t feel like a broken porcelain doll patched tentatively together with Superglue. I didn’t feel like the girl who ran home from cheerleading practice only to do additional cheerleading practice, lest no one catch on to the fact that she was a fraud. I felt, simply, like a person worth knowing._

That’s why he’s going to Riverdale, he decides. That’s why he’s going to find her. Not to rekindle a romance that technically never started in the first place. Not to tell her that if he could travel back in time, the first thing he’d do would be to yank the beanie right off his sixteen-year-old self’s head and make him confess everything. He’s not going to Riverdale to tell her that he’s never once wondered if she could have been his first love. He’s always known she would have been, if he’d thought for even a minute that she would let him love her. It’s entirely possible that she was— _is_ —anyway. 

But that’s not why he’s going.

He’s going because Betty Cooper has always, _always_ , been a person worth knowing.

  
  


From Erie to Riverdale is approximately eight hours without stops, so he sets an alarm for seven o’clock the next morning, and is on the road again within an hour of when it goes off. 

He’s told himself he’ll stop for a break every two hours; eight hours of driving time is much longer than he’s used to spending on a motorcycle. _Yesterday’s_ ride was much longer than he’s used to doing at a stretch, and as he pulls off I-90 just outside of Buffalo not even two hours after he began, he wonders if he is, in fact, already old. He self-medicates in the way he knows best, with coffee and a snack; to these, he adds a couple of Tylenol and the sobering thought that if he _is_ already old, he should probably cut down on the amount of junk food he eats. 

By the time he gets to the foothills of the Adirondacks, Jughead’s back and legs are aching in a way he’s not sure he’s ever felt before. He pulls over a couple more times, once to use the restroom and once simply to admire the leaves, which are just starting to turn. 

But he doesn’t stay off the road for long. He can’t.

Since he hit Buffalo this morning, the thought has been thrumming in the back of his mind that today is Saturday; Betty won’t be at school, and he does not, in fact, know where to find her. This is fine, though. The sun is already starting to dip below the horizon, and he of course doesn’t have flowers to put on his father’s grave; it’ll take him the rest of the night to even figure out what kind of flowers F.P. might _want_. 

(His memory throws up a brief, painful image of one of Jellybean’s school fundraisers, the one where all the kids had to make giant flowers out of wire and tissue paper, and his dad had bought one and worn it tucked behind his ear for an entire evening.)

His stomach is, predictably, rumbling as he passes the weathered sign announcing he’s about to enter the town with Pep! at long last, and he smiles wryly to himself inside his motorcycle helmet. Jughead Jones may have changed quite a bit over the last ten years, but there’s a reason he didn’t consciously think about where he would go first when he got to Riverdale. There was only ever one option. 

Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe looks just as it did six years ago, just as it did eleven years ago, just as it has for Jughead’s entire life. He puts down the bike’s kickstand in the gravel parking lot, but remains straddling the bike for a moment. 

He takes off his helmet and runs a hand through his hair. 

The boy who isn’t there, she’d called him, a perfect epithet if ever he’s heard one. How much of high school had he spent trying to be an invisible observer rather than an active participant? Almost all of it, except the time he spent with her? 

He thinks about taking the beanie from his bag, but doesn’t. 

He takes a deep breath and prepares to walk inside.

  
  


The bell on the door gives the same polite little tinkle it’s always given, and as the eerily ageless Pop Tate looks up from behind the counter as he always has, menu in hand, Jughead sees his jaw drop. 

So he’s recognizable even without the beanie, then. 

He’s about to say _Hey, Pop_ , but something in the older man’s expression keeps him silent. Still open-mouthed, Pop tilts his head ever so slightly to his right. 

As Jughead follows Pop’s look, as his gaze lands on a woman sitting alone in the second booth, time seems to slow. 

Her back is to him, but he knows it’s her. Her hair is a darker blonde now, and down around her shoulders instead of in its signature ponytail, but he knows it’s her. She’s got a cup of coffee on the table instead of a vanilla milkshake and she’s wearing a navy sweater instead of a pastel, but he knows it’s her. 

Even before Pop calls her name, she looks up from the pile of papers she’s grading and twists around in her booth. 

Betty Cooper has the most expressive face of anyone he’s ever known. But as her eyes—still impossibly wide, still impossibly green—land on him, he finds himself at a total loss as to what’s going through her mind. 

“Oh, my god,” she says, her voice just as soft and just as pretty as he remembers. “Oh, my _god_.”

He’s breathless again. 

What if, Jughead thinks. 

What if.

  
  


  
  


(to be continued...)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who commented on the first chapter! I'd love to hear what you think of this one, too.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With thanks to village_skeptic and heartunsettledsoul, and to everyone who's left comments and kudos on the first two chapters.

For a good long moment, all she can do is stare, dumbfounded, at the figure in the doorway. 

Betty’s hands clench themselves into fists, and she feels the familiar, calming sting in her palms before she can remind herself no, she hasn’t done that in years, and forces herself to relax. Then she thinks about letting her hands fly to the back of her head to tighten her ponytail before she remembers no, she wore her hair down today. 

“Oh, my god,” she hears herself say, and then again, “Oh, my _god_ ,” as if repeating the words with more emphasis is going to alter the sight before her.

It does not. Jughead Jones remains standing in the doorway of Pop’s, his head bare, his hands shoved in the pockets of an old leather jacket. She wrote an essay about him, yes, but that essay was about feelings she’d had _more than a decade ago_. And before her mother even stopped leaving strings of terse voice messages about “not airing your emotional dirty laundry in public, Elizabeth, the past is the _past_ , after all,” he’d shown up. 

_Email_ , she thinks, almost desperately; _has he never heard of email?_

This was not supposed to happen.

  
  


The last two days have not been particularly kind to Betty Cooper. 

“No one in Riverdale reads the _New York Times_ at all, let alone the personal essays about unconventional romance,” Cheryl had assured her months ago, when Betty showed her the rough draft. “Besides, everyone comes off fine except Polly and Jason, and you know when they read it, they’ll just invite you to the cult for the fall solstice elderberry wine uncorking and a little light recruitment.” 

Betty remembers considering this. “There is no fall solstice,” she’d pointed out. “There’s a fall equinox.” 

She remembers Cheryl’s response, too: “My point exactly, Cousin Betty.”

Cheryl was right about only one thing: at sunup on Friday morning, Polly had called her to say that while she adored the article and gosh, Betty was such a talented writer, she and her family were _not_ (for the umpteenth time) members of a cult, and did Betty want to come up to the Farm after school for the annual butternut squash harvest to see for herself? They were going to fill one of the sweat lodges with detoxifying herbs, she added, and do hot yoga in there throughout the weekend. 

“Mom’s coming,” Polly added cheerfully, as though this was a selling point. “You can drive up with her.” Betty politely declined. 

But, as it turned out, _everybody_ in Riverdale had read the personal essay about unconventional romance. 

The teasing from her students—mostly anonymous, in the form of printouts of her essay emblazoned with slogans such as “Ms. Cooper was a loser” and hung on the walls of her classroom and the door of the _Blue and Gold_ office—had been cruel. But they were nothing she couldn’t handle with a roll of her eyes, a reminder to her students that, thanks to being their teacher, she was capable of recognizing nearly everyone’s handwriting, and a pointed suggestion that they could at least have come up with more creative insults than that. 

By the end of the day, the _Blue and Gold_ blog was promising a full investigation into the matter of who had insulted their faculty adviser. If nothing else, Betty’s proud to have taught those kids a thing or two.

It’s possible, in fact, that she’s taught them too well. Her mind drifts back to the end of Friday’s final period, and the student who had quietly approached her with a copy of her _junior_ yearbook held open to the page showing the newspaper staff, pointed at Jughead, and asked, “Is that him?” 

Jughead, who’s still standing in front of her as she silently gapes. 

He shifts his weight from one foot to the other, shoulders slightly hunched, and Betty has no trouble at all reading the change in his body language for what it is: the sudden realization that her essay might not have been entirely truthful, that she could have been exaggerating the feelings she’d had for him or even making them up entirely, a silent admission that his abrupt trip to Riverdale may have been a mistake. 

She doesn’t form the thought consciously so much as viscerally, as a tug deep within her abdomen provides the deep and abiding knowledge that she has less than three seconds before Jughead turns and disappears from her life forever. 

“Jug,” she says. “It’s good to see you.” 

He hesitates for a split second, unspoken words forming on his lips, and Betty wills herself to smile convincingly. She’s not the world’s best liar, or at least Jughead was almost always able to see right through her, but then—

“Really,” she adds. 

But then, that’s not a lie. It _is_ good to see him. Even, maybe, under these circumstances. 

She tilts her head towards the empty side of her booth, and with the purest, most profound look of relief she thinks she’s ever seen, Jughead sits down, grabbing a menu from the counter on his way over. 

Betty busies herself with straightening up the essays she’s been grading, piling up the printouts and then tapping them on the table to make the edges align just so, while Jughead reads the menu like he’s just rediscovered a long-lost favorite story. 

“So,” she says.

He snaps to attention at once, bringing his eyes to meet hers. 

“What brings you to Riverdale, Jughead?” 

Jughead swallows once. For a split second, she’s absolutely terrified of what he’s going to say. 

His voice is light as he replies, “I heard the fries were good here,” and Betty finds she’s never been more thankful for his tendency to deflect.

  
  


When she gets into her car, she pulls her phone out of her purse and opens up her GPS app—not to map herself back to her own house, obviously she knows how to get home—but to check the distance between Riverdale and Toledo. 

Six hundred and eighty miles, give or take. 

Betty glances in her rearview mirror just in time to see Jughead’s head disappearing into a motorcycle helmet. This one is matte black, like the one she remembers him having when he first learned to ride, but it’s new-looking, and the kind that covers his entire head and face, not the kind that looks more like an old-school military helmet. 

And thank goodness for that, really. The old helmet always made her nervous. It never seemed like it would be enough, in a crash. 

Jughead gives her a little wave before she starts the car and drives away.

  
  


For the ten minutes it takes to drive from Pop’s to the house she still thinks of as new, Betty thinks. 

She thinks about the boy she considers her first real boyfriend, the one she’d met the day she moved into the freshman dorms and started dating a mere two weeks later. She thinks about how open he was with her, how enthusiastic he’d been about sex (and unskilled, something she’d suspected at the time but only truly realized in retrospect, after her second and third boyfriends), and how good their brief relationship had been for her. 

She thinks about the last man she dated, the one who’d claimed to be in love with her as they worked their way through their master’s program, but who’d broken up with her when he realized she was completely serious about filling the vacant English position at her alma mater. He’d gone to work at an inner-city school in Buffalo instead, and more power to him, really. 

She thinks about how hard she’d had to work to convince herself that coming back to Riverdale wasn’t giving up on all her hopes and dreams, whatever those had been. 

It wasn’t. It _isn’t_. She has no regrets. 

The dating pool was better in New York, though.

  
  


She pulls into her driveway, cuts the engine and then the lights, and takes a deep breath before she gets out of the car. One hand over her brow, shielding her eyes from the single headlamp, she waits for Jughead to cut his own engine and remove his helmet before she walks up to the side of the bike and asks him, “Do you want to park in the garage?” 

“Aren’t you going to put your car in the garage?” 

“No, it’s fine. I never do unless it’s snowing.” She shrugs. “Haven’t installed an automatic opener yet. It’s on the list.” 

Jughead taps his fingers on his helmet, and watching him, she notices a little yellow Basquiat crown decal at the back of it. 

She smiles. 

“Are you sure about this, Betty?” 

“Am I sure the Five Seasons shut down three years ago?” 

“Are you sure you want me staying in your house?” He sounds as though he's correcting her. “It’s not that far to Greendale. I can get a motel room.” 

“No, don’t be silly,” she says, repeating the words she'd used back at Pop’s. “I have plenty of room.” 

“That’s not the point.” 

She raises her eyebrows. “Jughead. I want you to stay here.” 

Betty’s new house stands fairly far back from the road, and the nearest street light doesn’t reach very far into her driveway. She didn’t think to turn her outside house lights on before she left for Pop’s. Almost none of her face is illuminated, and she wonders if Jughead can tell she’s trying to convince herself he ought to accept her invitation as much as she’s trying to convince him. 

“Okay,” he says, turning his headlight off at long last. “Okay.”

  
  


There’s not much of a tour to give, but she gives him one anyway, starting with the living room. 

“I’ve only been here since February,” she says. “It’s not in great shape, yet, but I’m working on it. Slowly.” 

“It’s nice.” He’s gravitated to the bookshelf, and is now studying the contents of its shelves.

“If you’re looking for your novel, I haven’t been able to find it.” 

“It’s still at the querying phase.” He pulls a book out from the shelf. “Would you mind if I borrowed this, while I’m here?” 

“Of course not,” Betty tells him, not even bothering to look at what he’s pulled out. “You’ve written a novel, though? For real?” 

“Three,” he says absently, going back to the bookshelf. “Well, the third one’s just a rough draft right now. But the first two are awful. I’m not even trying to publish those.” 

So many afternoons, in between article reviews and during homework breaks, they had talked about this very subject—or maybe _around_ the subject would be a better phrase; Jughead had always been remarkably tight-lipped about whatever it was he happened to be writing for pleasure at any given moment, even with her. He’d once let her read a short story before he submitted it to Riverdale High’s literary magazine; it had been accepted, of course, not because it was great—though she had thought it was, at the time—but because getting anyone to actually submit anything to it was like pulling teeth. 

(Betty knows this for a fact, because she had edited the literary magazine, in addition to the newspaper. In fact, now that she’s thinking about it, she’s pretty sure Jughead had only submitted his story because she’d spent an entire week begging him to do so.) 

It was understood between them, she thought, that he would like to someday be a published author. But only rarely had he spoken about the future, even in abstract terms. 

“You know, I still have that issue of the _Digest_ ,” she says now, musing briefly on where it might be hidden in her mom’s house, and then, “So is that what you do now? Professionally, I mean? Writing?”

He looks up, surprised. “Yeah, sort of. I work at one of those indie weeklies that’s, you know… a third alternative news, a third movie and music reviews, and then the last third is pretty much just ads for X-rated shit.” 

She’s familiar with the type. “But you are writing for a living?” 

“I mean, it’s all hands on deck. Last week I reviewed a food truck, covered a mayoral press conference, and spent six hours on the phone trying to convince an adult bookstore that they should keep giving us money.” 

“Still,” she says, a little wistfully. She’d worked in publishing in New York City, and loved it. She’d also waitressed in New York City, and spent some time as a dog walker, and for five brutal months she’d done all three in a futile attempt to pay off her undergrad loans and still get something, _anything_ , in the bank. 

A wry little smile appears on Jughead’s face. “It only pays the bills because the cost of living in Toledo is ridiculously low,” he says. “And it’s not the _New York Times_ , Cooper.”

  
  


She brings a set of towels (her fluffiest) to the guest room, which is not so much a proper guest room as it is a home office that happens to contain an old pull-out couch she’d found in her mom’s attic. 

“The bed part is pretty comfy,” she says. “I can make it up for you now, if you want. I just have to get the sheets.” 

Jughead drops his bag on the floor. “You don’t have to. I’m sure I can figure it out.” 

“Well, I do have to get the sheets. You don’t know where they are.” 

“Are they behind the door at the end of your hall that looks suspiciously like the door to a linen closet?” 

“Okay, yes,” she concedes. “But you don’t know which sheets go on this couch.” 

“You’ve got a point there.” 

“See, you do have to let me be a good hostess,” she says, grinning at him. 

When she’s alone again, in the hallway that leads to the linen closet, she wonders what the hell she’s doing.

  
  


She makes up the bed while Jughead showers, and then she makes a pot of chamomile tea and puts it on a tray with two mugs. And the sugar dish. And two spoons. 

She doesn’t have time to bake cookies. 

_For god’s sake, Betty_ , she tells herself. 

Then she puts a half-eaten package of Oreos on the tray, rolls her eyes, and heads upstairs.

  
  


Sitting on the edge of the mattress in plaid pajama bottoms and an old Oberlin College t-shirt, Jughead looks skeptically at the chamomile tea, sniffs it, and mutters something about this being the crap that his coworker drinks. 

“So,” Betty says. She’s sitting in her desk chair, behind the desk; the feeling is both reminiscent of their old newspaper office times and therefore familiar and comfortable and, somehow—since Jughead is essentially ready for bed—deeply, deeply weird. “What do you want to do tomorrow?”

He shoots her a funny look. “You don’t have to be responsible for me.” 

“I know,” she says quickly. “I just—I do have some stuff I need to get done this weekend. But as long as you’re here, you know?” 

He nods, his gaze slipping off her and into empty space. He stirs the spoon around in his cup a few times, and then he asks, simply, “Archie?” 

“Still here,” she says. “Still co-running Andrews Construction. Married. Two years now, I think? His wife is super nice; you’ll like her. They’re expecting sometime in March.” 

“Wow.” 

“I know, right? I think Archie’s a little overwhelmed by it already. You should see Fred, though. He’s over the moon. It’s really adorable.” 

“Okay,” says Jughead. 

“Okay, what?” 

“I’ll see Fred.” He pauses, considering. “It’ll be good to see Fred.” 

“And Archie?” 

“Well, yeah. Obviously, and Archie.” 

“I can’t believe you two didn’t stay in touch at all,” she says. “You were like brothers for so long.” 

Jughead exhales forcefully, and shifts in his seat. “We had a big fight right before I moved. I don’t even know whose fault it was, now.” He pauses, looking pensive, and Betty can see him rearranging bits and pieces of the story in his mind. “It was right after my mom told me we were leaving, so I was furious anyway, when I went over to tell him. And he just… he was in one of his moods, if you remember those, where he couldn’t wrap his brain around the fact that it was possible to play football _and_ be in a band at the same time.” 

“Oh, yeah.” Betty can’t help but roll her eyes. “I remember.” 

“Right. Ridiculous. How many extracurriculars did you handle, nine? So I get over there, and I can’t even get out ‘Hey, my parents are splitting up and we’re moving to Ohio as soon as the school year’s over’ before Archie starts moaning about early summer one-a-days possibly interfering with this music class he wanted to take at the community college, and—I mean, I kind of lost it at him. He just couldn’t seem to get that _maybe_ his problem wasn’t the most important one right then.” 

“Yeah,” Betty says, sympathetically. “He’s still like that sometimes. Not nearly as bad, though.” 

“Anyway, I definitely didn’t handle it well at the time, and then… well, then he showed up at school on Monday acting like we’d never had a fight at all. No apology, nothing. And I just kind of said ‘screw you,’ like—well, we’re not going to be seeing each other anyway; might as well just rip the Band-Aid off now. You know?” He shrugs. “It was fine, when we saw each other at the funeral. It’s all been water under the bridge for a while.” 

Betty blinks, and is surprised to find tears starting to form in her eyes. “I wish I’d been able to do more,” she says, dabbing at the tears with the cuff of her sweater. “At the time.” 

“Don’t.” Jughead’s voice is decisive; forceful, even. When she looks up, though, she finds him wearing a curious half-smile that’s so familiar to her, so reminiscent of the way he used to look at her in the newspaper office, she almost jumps. “What could you have done?” 

The question is a rhetorical one, but Betty’s never been good at leaving any kind of question unanswered. 

“I could have told you,” she says, quietly. 

_And there it is_ , Betty thinks: the first verbal acknowledgement of what she’d put into the essay, hanging out there in the air between them. She could have told him. 

Suddenly restless, she stands up, crosses to the well-worn path in front of the window, and begins pacing. 

“Betty,” he says with a tiny shake of his head. “That would have just made it all so much worse.” 

He remains on the couch, still in the position that’s always looked so uncomfortable to her—hunched over, elbows on his knees, chin in one hand—then seems to catch himself, and shifts so he’s upright, crossing one ankle over the other knee. The foot that’s propped up starts bouncing, _bounce bounce bounce_. A thought starts to bubble up in Betty’s mind, rising higher and higher with each bounce, until it reaches crescendo, breaking and spilling over in a tidal wave of silent, internal, maniacal laughter: _oh, god, why did I ever think—_

But no: she’s not going to let herself be embarrassed over feelings she had almost half a lifetime ago. She forces herself to stop pacing, and turns to look fully at him. 

“What do you mean, that would have made it worse?” She’s started fidgeting with the pendant on her necklace, she realizes; ceasing the expenditure of all nervous energy seems, in this moment, a complete impossibility. But knowing the truth—how could that ever make something worse? 

“Betty.” This time, he doesn’t speak her name so much as breathe it. “You really couldn’t…” 

_Couldn’t what_ , her brain seems to gasp; _couldn’t what, couldn’t what?_

“I had a huge crush on you,” he says, as though it had not only been completely obvious at the time, but was still obvious now. “Or more, maybe. How long can a crush go on before you have to start calling it something else?” 

“How long?” she repeats. They’re the only words she can manage now, as the little whirring noise she always seems to have going in the back of her mind gets exponentially louder. 

Jughead seems to take this as an actual question, not a faint parroting of words. “I don’t really know, to be honest. I just… we all got to the age when we started noticing girls, or boys in some cases, and…” He looks up at her with the same half-smile she knows so well, the familiar one he'd worn earlier; it's also the one he wears when he’s about to say something ironic, or sarcastic, or self-deprecating. “I only ever noticed you.”

“Juggie.” She walks back to the chair she’d abandoned earlier and lowers herself into it, tucking one foot underneath her. _A teenager’s pose_ , she thinks. “Why didn’t you ever say anything?” 

“Because you could have done better,” he says, as though he’s stating the most obvious fact in the world. “Or that was what I thought at the time. In case you never noticed, Betts, I didn’t exactly have a lot going for me.” 

“That’s not true.” Betty stands up again—her body, it seems, refuses to be at rest tonight. 

“You don’t have to defend my sixteen-year-old self to me. I was an overdramatic little shit.” He chuckles. “Maybe I still am. I did just drive almost seven hundred miles to tell a girl I haven’t seen in six years that I might have been in love with her in high school.” 

Jughead looks at her, and she looks back, and suddenly her mind reconciles both parts of him: the boy she could have loved, and the man he’s become. 

(He hasn't said whether or not he’s single now... but surely it’s safe to assume that he is?) 

She sits next to him on the old pull-out couch, putting her hand gently on his knee. A moment later, he covers her hand with his, not passively but actively. Betty watches as his thumb rubs idle, lazy circles over her knuckles.

“Don’t think I didn’t imagine it, you know? You confessing you’d secretly had feelings for me all along, right before I moved? Because I did,” he says, and even though he sounds completely, totally okay, Betty’s heart still shatters into a million pieces. “And even that was almost too much, when it was nothing but a fantasy. I don’t think I could have stood knowing that it wasn’t.” 

“No.”

She looks up, and their eyes lock. 

“No,” she says again. “Jug, you—even if we couldn’t have done anything with it, even if we’d only had that one week, it still wasn’t fair. You deserved to know then.” 

A long, long pause passes in between them. He hasn’t shaved since he got here, she doesn’t think (or at least, he didn’t leave any evidence of it in the bathroom), and yet his skin is still smooth. 

The corner of Jughead’s mouth lifts into the tiniest of smiles. 

“Well,” he says, softly, “I know now.”

  
  


  
  


(to be continued…)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, this is all a bit of a whirlwind, from a writing perspective; I'm not sure I've ever gone from concept to almost 10k so quickly before. I can't promise another chapter will come in another 2-3 days (in fact, I can almost assure you that it won't, as I won't have much writing time over the weekend), but I do have the rest of the fic roughly sketched out. 
> 
> Reviews are always appreciated!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to heartunsettledsoul for looking over this, unnecessary kitten metaphors and all.

He knows, now. 

Betty knows, now. Telling her had been easy, surprisingly so. 

They know. But as Jughead sits on the mattress of her pull-out couch, staring blankly at his hand on her hand on his knee, all he can think is that knowing doesn’t make much of a difference. Knowing that the past could have been different doesn’t change the way it unfolded. Knowing he could have, _should_ have, taken different actions doesn’t change anything about the actions that he did take—or that Betty took, although he’s unwilling to shift any of the blame onto her. 

At this point he’s read her essay so many times he doesn’t even have to get his laptop out to recall the exact words he’s thinking of: _I stood in front of my bedroom mirror and wondered, despairingly, what parts of myself I was supposed to improve **now**_. She’d written that specifically in relation to Archie, but he can see how the words might also apply not just to him, but to everyone else in her teenage life. Betty always tried so hard to be everything to everyone. At the time, Jughead had felt that made her too much, too _good_ for him; now, finally, he understands that the impossibility of being everything to everyone made Betty feel as though she wasn’t enough for anybody, maybe not even for herself. 

(He can see that in her, still, that determination to make everything and everyone around her okay. There’s no other explanation for how he’s come to be staying in her house.) 

The knowledge makes him sad, on behalf of both their sixteen-year-old selves. It makes him want to pull her into his lap and stroke her hair, even though he doesn’t have any idea whether Betty would have liked that then, and certainly doesn’t know whether she would like it now. 

“I should go to bed,” she says, eventually. “Let you get some sleep. You must be tired.” 

She stands up, and he stands up, and hesitantly, they hug. 

“Good night, Jug.” The words are small and comforting and vibrate against his chest like a tiny purring kitten he’d throw himself in front of an oncoming train to protect. 

“Good night,” he echoes. “Sleep well, Betty.”

  
  


The problem with sharing a name with your father is that it’s impossible to see his name on his gravestone without being irredeemably, depressingly confronted by your own mortality. 

One of the problems with sharing a name with your father. Actually, Jughead supposes, it’s probably impossible for anyone to stand in front of a parent’s grave without contemplating one’s mortality. 

Then he reads “Forsythe Pendleton Jones” again and decides, not for the first time, that in his particular case, the biggest problem is the name itself. 

There are no other words on F.P.’s tombstone, just the standard “R.I.P.” and the dates of his birth and death. Neither he nor his mother nor his sister had been able to think of an appropriate phrase. One of his father’s associates had insisted that F.P. would have wanted _A Serpent never sheds his skin_ , and he recoils now at the memory of how he’d had to shout down a goddamned gang member over those nonsensical words. In retrospect, he’s amazed he didn’t have a knife pulled on him. 

(“You oughta do something that scares you every once in a while,” F.P. was fond of saying. 

In his hands, the phrase tended to not be a self-improvement mantra so much as a threat. He’d deliver it with a sly, serpentine grin that inevitably sent the pit of Jughead’s stomach into an active churn, understanding as he did that something genuinely dangerous was about to happen. 

Planning a funeral was not supposed to be one of those things.)

Someone, he sees, has etched a little snake into the rock. Badly. It looks like a petroglyph, and even though he knows F.P. couldn’t have been responsible for the addition, it nevertheless feels like a completely unnecessary reminder of his father’s warped priorities. 

It’s really not surprising he hasn’t returned here since the funeral. Even now, he’s half expecting a gang member to jump out from behind a tree. 

“So, I guess I’m supposed to talk to you.” 

He stands there for a few more minutes. No one jumps out from behind any trees, and no conversational topics pop into Jughead’s mind. 

“Still got the motorcycle.” He pauses. “Rode it here from Ohio.” 

In the end, it seems, that’s all he has to say.

  
  


“In the kitchen!” Betty calls, when he opens the front door. 

He finds her at the table, a neat spread of half-graded homework laid out on the gingham tablecloth. Her hair is in the ponytail he remembers so well, and she’s twirling the end around two fingers while she frowns at what he imagines to be a distressingly incorrect answer. 

“You could’ve used the office,” he says. It’s the third time today he’s told her so—it’s her house and there’s no reason she shouldn’t utilize a room for its intended purpose just because he happens to be sleeping in it—but that argument seems to have fallen on deaf ears. 

“It’s fine. I work down here half the time anyway. How was the... ” She looks up from the homework, and her frown turns into a slightly different frown. “What are those?” 

He’d stood in front of the bouquets in the grocery store (still Riverdale’s best and only choice for floral arrangements, apparently) for a full ten minutes on his way to the cemetery, trying to figure out which ones F.P. would have most appreciated with literally nothing to go on. Not once had he ever known his father to bring his mother flowers—not on Valentine’s Day or her birthday or their wedding anniversary, and definitely not spontaneously. All he could hear was a gruff voice in his head, half laughing the words _Boy, don’t waste your money on me._

Then he’d—rather morbidly—thought about buying a six-pack of cheap beer and pouring one or two out over the grave, but that sounded both like a waste of money and in incredibly poor taste. F.P. would have loved it, and that seemed to Jughead like another very good reason not to do it. 

But not all his memories of his father are awful, and so he’d also stood there remembering the one time Archie had convinced him to just show up at a school dance, and how F.P.’s eyes had taken on a strange, proud glow at the sight of Jughead standing in the trailer in a suit that didn’t quite fit. He’d insisted on teaching Jughead how to tie a tie (which he already knew, thanks to internet tutorial videos), and he’d imparted all the fatherly dating advice he could muster. Most of it Jughead already recognized as misogyny masquerading as chivalry, but there were a few pearls of wisdom buried in there. 

“Buy flowers for the girl you’re taking,” F.P. had told him then. Though Jughead wasn’t taking any girl, and didn’t ask any to dance once he was there, he’d nevertheless imagined walking up to the Coopers’ red front door with a better bouquet than he could afford, imagined Betty smiling, imagined... 

“Jughead.” 

…well, he didn’t imagine that bringing Betty a bouquet of flowers would make her look, suddenly, exhausted. 

Right. 

“They’re just flowers.” He lays them on the counter. “They don’t have to mean anything.” 

“No,” Betty says. “Of course not. They’re beautiful. Thank you.” 

Jughead nods, slowly. 

They don’t have to mean anything, but they could, and he’s terrified to ask whether she wants them to.

  
  


When he wanders downstairs a few hours later to ask what she wants to do about dinner, he sees that the flowers have been arranged nicely in a vase and placed at the side of the kitchen table.

“There’s chicken in the fridge I should use,” Betty says, but her eyes look glazed over from grading and it’s not too much work to convince her to let him order a pizza. 

Their pizza is delivered by a greasy-haired teenager, one who does an actual double take when Jughead opens the door. 

“Careful,” Jughead says, reaching out to steady the pizza box. 

The teenager blinks and shakes his head. “Right. Sorry. That’s, uh...oh, you pre-paid.” 

“Yeah, I did.” 

He takes the pizza and closes the front door in the kid’s face, choosing to ignore the fact that the kid is definitely trying to peer around him and into the house. 

“Weird delivery boy you’ve got there,” he tells Betty, who’s just finished clearing off the table and is now putting out complete place settings for each of them, including cloth napkins in rings. _Always a Cooper_ , he thinks. “One of your students? He seemed to be looking for you.” 

She winces. “Was it Cameron?” 

“I didn’t get a name.” 

“About five-ten, kind of skinny, hipster glasses, looks like he needs a shower?” 

Jughead nods. 

“That’s Cameron,” Betty sighs. “God, if even _he_ read it…” 

“Uh,” Jughead starts, before realizing that he doesn’t have anywhere to go with this. 

“Anyway, Archie texted. Dinner on Tuesday?” 

“I’ve got no plans,” he says (except to stay here until Tuesday, now), and Betty nods slowly while turning in a circle, looking for all the world like she’s forgotten where she keeps the silverware.

  
  


He wakes up early on Monday morning, when Betty does, and forces himself out of bed and into clothes. 

“I was thinking, last night, after I went to bed,” she says, after she’s handed him a cup of coffee. “Would you want to come to school at some point this week? Maybe talk to the _Blue and Gold_ kids about working in publishing? It would be great for them to hear.” 

“Sure.” 

Betty lights up, as though she expected him to say the exact opposite, and he shrugs. 

“It’s the absolute least I could do,” he tells her, and then, “When?” 

She thinks for a moment. “We go to press on Wednesday—well, ‘go to press,’ I mean, it’s entirely digital now—but we put it online Wednesday. So maybe Thursday?” 

“Thursday it is,” Jughead says, fighting down the urge to light up himself. 

He’s staying until Thursday. That’s his plan, now, to stay until Thursday. 

Then he remembers Cameron. “Is it going to be weird?” he asks. “Like, do your students—do they know? Or, will they?” 

He watches her lower lip temporarily disappear and then pop back, brighter and plumper. “They might,” she concedes. “They might make it weird. Does that bother you?” 

Not that the opinions of maybe a dozen teenagers ought to matter to him—and they don’t, really—but he can’t imagine being bothered by them, or anyone, knowing that _Betty Cooper_ had once wanted to kiss him. 

“Nope,” he says. “Not in the slightest.”

  
  


He’s halfway through his second coffee refill (and first plate of midmorning French fries) at Pop’s when his phone rings. The call is from a number that’s not saved in his phone, but which he vaguely recognizes as one of the extensions from work. 

Reluctantly, he swipes to accept. “Hello?” 

“Where _are_ you?” demands Toni’s voice. 

“Why? Is something interesting happening?” 

“No. I just emailed you and got your auto-response thingy. Since when do you take vacations?” 

“Since HR told me I had to,” he says, praying that this will be the end of it and Toni won’t require a lengthy explanation. 

It’s not, and she does. 

“I’m in Riverdale,” he sighs. “Where I grew up. I came back for a visit.” 

He can just picture her—standing behind her desk with one hip stuck out and both eyebrows raised. “Why?” 

“Why wouldn’t I go back for a visit?” 

“Why now, Jones? Unless this is your most elaborate scheme yet for getting out of your birthday.” 

“I—what?” Jughead slumps a little harder against the vinyl, pinching the bridge of his nose with one hand. “How do you even know when my birthday is? I never told you.” 

“Took a peek at your driver’s license,” she says, matter-of-fact, like going into his wallet was neither creepy nor an extreme violation of privacy; he calls her out on that, but she simply ignores him, and continues to needle until he finally can’t take the pricking anymore, and gives up. 

“Okay, fine,” he grumbles. “You know that Modern Love column you sent me on Friday?” 

“Already deleted it from my memory,” she says promptly. “Stop deflecting, Jones.” 

“I’m not deflecting. It’s—it’s me. I’m the boy.” 

“What boy?” 

“The one who wasn’t there. In the essay. I’m him. So I… came back.” 

There’s a brief pause before Toni says, “You’re shitting me.” It takes a few more minutes to convince her that he isn’t, and in the end, she tells him, rather succinctly, “You’re a real piece of work, Jughead, you know that?” 

“I know,” he groans. 

“Is she at least hot?” 

He pictures Betty before she left for work this morning: a knee-length pencil skirt, not too snug; a crisp button-down shirt patterned with little multicolored dots; a soft blue sweater over the shirt. All he can remember about her shoes is that her legs looked amazing in them. She’d pulled her hair up into a sort of bun. It was all very _mature_ , and, he suspects, essentially a costume meant to make her look older and more authoritative. 

Jughead doesn’t even realize he’s gotten lost in a daydream about the Riverdale High English classroom, and slowly unbuttoning Betty’s blouse under the old poster of Oscar Wilde that he’s sure must still be hanging on the wall, until Toni mutters, “Well, that answers _that_ question,” calls him a moron, and then adds, more affectionately, “Jughead, there’s nothing wrong with letting yourself be swayed by a pretty face every once in a while.” 

“That’s not the point,” he protests. 

“You keep telling yourself that,” Toni says, and then she hangs up on him.

  
  


_Do something that scares you every once in a while_ , he tells himself.

  
  


He starts small, with cooking that package of chicken in Betty’s fridge even though he doesn’t know where she keeps anything in the kitchen and even though she might not even _want_ anybody messing around in her kitchen. The latter point doesn’t even occur to him until the chicken is in the oven and it’s far too late to go back. 

She gets home at six on the dot, just when she’d said she would, takes in the kitchen (it’s a bit of a mess, but he’s got things under control, honestly), says, faintly, “Excuse me a minute,” and disappears upstairs. 

Ten minutes later, she’s back, in jeans and an old sweatshirt. She’s taken all her makeup off, too, and Jughead wonders if her red-rimmed eyes are a product of tears or if she just went overboard scrubbing her face. 

“It smells good,” she says. “I didn’t know you could cook.” 

He nods. “Well enough to keep myself alive, at least.” 

“It’s a nice surprise.” 

But there’s a pensive look in her eye all through dinner. If she’s thinking what Jughead suddenly is—that there are _so many_ things they don’t know about each other, twelve whole years’ worth of missing pieces—she doesn’t say so.

  
  


They clean up the kitchen together, and then Betty decides to bake cookies, the extra-chewy maple walnut oatmeal ones whose recipe has been included on the backs of certain Blossom Maple Farms maple syrup bottles for decades. Jughead hasn’t had them in years, probably not since before he moved; no one in his family has ever baked. It’s likely, he thinks, that Betty was responsible for those cookies too. 

He’s sitting in the living room reading the book he’d pulled from her shelf when Betty comes in with a tray. 

“Movie?” she suggests, without much enthusiasm. 

Instead, they talk. 

Jughead tells her about his short stories and his ridiculous pen name and his sister’s third attempt at college, and she tells him about the horrible magazine she’d worked for in New York and Polly’s supposedly-a-commune-but-probably-a-cult and what had happened when she’d come home for Christmas four years ago, a story that’s triggered by his lament over Ohio’s lack of Blossom Maple Farms brand syrup.

“You were still here when my family found out we were related to the Blossoms, right?” She doesn’t wait for his nod before continuing. “But I think you were gone when Clifford Blossom died under shady circumstances.”

“Clifford Blossom’s dead?” 

She nods. “Five years ago, I think? Officially it was a heart attack, but Cheryl still swears he was taken out by the Quebecois maple syrup cartel. Anyway, the point is that after he died, my parents had a big fight about something, I don’t know what, and it somehow ended up in my dad cheating on my mom with Penelope Blossom—”

At this, Jughead nearly chokes on his mouthful of cookie. 

“I know, right? So my mom threw him out. And then the next thing we knew, he’d moved in with Penelope. It’s _so_ weird, still. Even by Blossom standards.” 

“Yikes,” Jughead offers, which seems like the best he, or indeed anyone, can do. 

“Yeah. And then there was another huge kerfuffle when it turned out that Clifford left _everything_ to Jason. Like, literally everything. But of course, Jason didn’t want to run the family business, so he just pumped all the cash into his commune and gave all the assets to Cheryl. Who is a kickass businesswoman, it turns out.” 

“That’s not really a surprise.” 

Betty grins. “It’s not, huh? Anyway, some good came out of it. Cheryl and I are actually close now. She’s a lot more pleasant now that she’s the boss of everyone.” 

“So her mom and your dad are still…” 

“Living together in this old house on the back of the Blossom estate. Cheryl gives them what she calls a ‘pity pittance.’ My mom got the _Register_ in the divorce. I don’t know what the hell they do with their time; I hardly ever see them.” She sighs. “It’s been a weird few years. I didn’t really intend to buy my own place so quickly, but I’d been living with my mom since I came back to Riverdale, you know, just to save up? And I just couldn’t take it anymore. Lucky for me it’s been a buyer’s market here since about the Reagan administration.” 

“That’s… a lot,” Jughead agrees. 

“Especially since my mom’s been a lot more open to the cult stuff since she and my dad split up.” She leans forward to grab another cookie, which she examines thoroughly instead of eating. “Was your mom… how did she handle things? If you don’t mind my asking,” she adds hastily, as though she’s afraid she’s hit an open wound instead of one that scabbed over a decade ago. 

He shrugs. “I hated her for the first few months, more for the move than the divorce. But I always understood why she did it, even when I was pretending not to.” 

“Even the move, though?” 

“Especially the move,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to stay here. But Dad was starting to hint about me joining the Serpents someday. I think that might have been one of the last straws.” 

At this, Betty actually flinches. “You wouldn’t have,” she says, at once. “You never would have. Would you?” 

“I wish I could say no. But who knows?” He takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly; it’s unlike him to be so open, even about things he thinks he’s come to terms with, and he’s starting to feel slightly lightheaded. “Sometimes I think I’m a lot more like him than I want to admit, you know?” 

Betty gets up and crosses to the window, peering through the open curtains when she gets there. She’s silent for long enough that Jughead starts to wonder more seriously if he’s dumped too much on her. 

“Let’s go for a walk,” she says.

  
  


Like so many other places in Riverdale, Betty’s backyard seems in immediate danger of being taken over by the forest at any given moment. 

“This way,” she says, leading him straight past the small patio he’d assumed they were aiming for and towards the treeline. Her path seems predetermined—a suspicion confirmed when he realizes that they’re headed for a gap in the trees, that Betty brought a flashlight with her, and that despite the mid-evening darkness, she doesn’t seem to need it. 

“Do you go walking in the woods alone at night a lot?” he wonders aloud, as they hit something resembling a trail. “Please tell me you don’t.” 

“Not a lot,” she counters. “Jug, it’s _Riverdale_. What on earth do you think is out here?” 

He doesn’t have an answer to that. 

About ten minutes later, they arrive at the banks of Sweetwater River, which rushes cold and clear in the crisp autumn night. Moonlight shines from a cloudless sky, making the river look almost black. 

_You oughta do something that scares you every once in a while_ , he thinks. 

Betty climbs onto a nearby boulder, then hugs her arms tightly across her chest, though she doesn’t seem to be cold. She just stands there and watches the river.

He wonders if the river scares her. He wonders if anything does.

  
  


Tuesday night comes, and as seems to be the case with everything over the last few days, Jughead finds himself in a place he never thought he’d ever be again. 

It’s weird, being back at Archie’s house. Sitting in Archie’s dining room, eating takeout Chinese food. It’s weird. 

It’s the _same house_. 

“He never moved out?” he’d said, when Betty pulled into the familiar driveway. 

“He did, but they moved back in after he and Brigitte got married.” 

Jughead then blinked at the old yellow house, turned his head briefly to the Cooper house next door, and blinked at that, too. 

“My mom’s still there,” she’d said. “I have no idea why she won’t downsize. It’s such a huge house for one person. She keeps claiming she needs the space in case Polly and the twins ever want to come home.” 

Betty’s right, as usual. He does like Brigitte, who is, he learns, the music teacher at Riverdale High. (He looks side-eyed at Betty when he learns _that_ bit of information, and Betty purses her lips tightly shut and shakes her head, a silent _Don’t even go there_.) Brigitte is also warm and friendly and absolutely nothing like he’d imagined someone Archie would end up with. Archie, who’d immediately embraced him in a standard bro-hug, said “Great to see you, man,” and has since kept silent while Fred and Brigitte ask him endless questions about his life in Toledo. 

“You’ve really made something of yourself, huh, Jug?” Fred says, with the sort of fatherly pride Jughead’s not sure anyone has ever directed at him before. 

Archie pushes back from the table. “I’m going to start clearing up.” 

“I’ll help,” Betty says, grabbing Brigitte’s plate in addition to her own before disappearing into the kitchen with Archie. Fred keeps asking questions, various rattling and dishwashing sounds emerge from the kitchen, and in the split second when all those noises simultaneously cease, Jughead distinctly hears Betty hiss “It’s none of your business either way, Archie.” 

Jughead, Fred, and Brigitte all flick their eyes toward the kitchen. 

“So,” Brigitte says brightly. “Who wants ice cream?”

Archie stabs his ice cream with his spoon, but at least his glare is gone. Jughead reaches for extra sprinkles.

  
  


“Sorry he was being an ass,” she says, on the drive back to her house. 

“Yeah, me too,” Jughead mutters. “Don’t apologize for him, though.” 

“I’m not. Well, I guess I kind of am.” She’s silent for a moment as she waits to make a left turn, and then says, “I think he feels threatened by other people’s success—no, don’t _scoff_ , Jughead. It may not feel like a big deal to you, but everything you’ve accomplished, you’ve done on your own, and that _is_ a big deal. Archie… I think he feels like he just got stuck in someone else’s life. Fred’s life, specifically.” 

And while Jughead’s immediate instinct is to retort that being saddled with a job at a well-established company you happen to own, a nice house that’s nearly paid off, and a wife who clearly adores you is a pretty great life to get stuck in… well, he supposes he sees her point. 

“But you’re right,” she says, interrupting his train of thought. “I shouldn’t apologize for him.”

  
  


On Saturday night, they’d sat and talked in the guest room, and on Sunday, the kitchen. Last night they’d talked in the living room, which must have completed some sort of cycle; tonight they’re back in the guest room, with more of the horrible flower water that Betty claims is herbal tea. She’s moved her desk chair out from behind the desk, and she sits there with her socked feet propped up on the edge of the mattress—close enough for Jughead to touch, if he were the kind of person who gave spontaneous foot rubs. 

(He isn’t.) 

“So you like Brigitte?” 

“I do,” he says, honestly. “But I always thought Archie would marry Veronica, you know? Go to work for Hiram, spend his evenings playing open mics and dive bars.” 

Betty chuckles. “We all did.” 

“Which of them broke it off?” 

“I don’t really know.” Betty shakes her head, the gesture makes her hair catch the moonlight that’s streaming through the window just so, and he has to fight the urge to reach out and touch it. “I always figured if they broke up, it would be with a bang, but they just kind of petered out.” 

“Where is Veronica these days?” 

“Paris, probably. I’d have to check Instagram.” Betty stares into her mug for a moment, as though she’s trying to divine the future, even in the absence of tea leaves. “She offered me a job, you know. With her dad’s company. I could have stayed in New York. Good salary, even.” 

“But you didn’t take it,” he says. 

Betty shrugs, still staring at the tea. “It wasn’t work I was interested in doing. And it felt like charity. Veronica and I weren’t even close at that point. Maybe if we had been, I would have accepted, but…” She lifts her head. “My mom thought I was crazy not to, even though she still hates the Lodges.”

 _You oughta do something that scares you every once in a while_ , he thinks. Betty hasn’t said so, but he thinks he knows, now, what she might be afraid of. 

But what about him? 

He’s all too aware that his father’s advice is, historically, best not to follow—but when _was_ the last time he, Jughead Jones, did anything truly scary? Cooking boneless, skinless chicken breasts doesn't count, and neither does eating Chinese food with the Andrews. Why hadn’t he been scared to come back to Riverdale, to find Betty, to tell her how he’d felt then? He should have been afraid to do all of those things, and he wasn’t. Not really. In fact, as he runs through the last few days over and over again in his mind, he realizes there’s only one thing that truly scares him right now. 

It’s the thought of what’s going to happen when his vacation time runs out and he has to go back to Toledo.

In high school, he’d been so afraid that Betty would reject him that he never gave her the opportunity to do so. Now, he realizes he’s almost desperate to give her that chance. But there’s something he needs to know first. 

He takes a big sip of the godawful tea, swallows, and puts his mug decisively on the side table. 

“Betty?” 

She looks up.

  
  


  
  


(to be continued...)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, comments and reviews are greatly appreciated, and definitely motivating.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **heartunsettledsoul:** you tease  
>  **stillscape:** listen  
>  **stillscape:** ...or don't, actually, I got nothing

Betty looks up. 

_Please don’t ask if you can kiss me_ , she thinks, almost desperately; _I’m not ready to give you an answer yet_. 

He doesn’t. He asks, instead, “Why did you write that essay?” 

Oh. 

Her first instinct is to claim not to know, not _really_. That’s a thing people say. That’s a thing she says, sometimes: “I don’t know.” 

Sometimes people find it reassuring when she says she doesn’t know, when she gives them a small, smiling admission that she doesn’t have every last little bit of her life pulled together. Even though she often does know, even as she usually knows, even as she usually knows and is simultaneously screaming, internally, _but that doesn’t mean I have anything figured out_. 

But this—why she wrote that essay—she knows. She does know. And so she tells him, as simply as she can.

“To prove I could.” 

She could give the answer more flesh, if she wanted. She’d been working on developing a unit on personal essays, and what better way to teach a type of writing than to master it yourself? She’d been feeling both confused and introspective ever since that Christmas conversation with Polly, and looking for a way to sort out her feelings beyond the journaling she’d done at the time. 

She wonders if that was the answer Jughead’s looking for. What he probably wants to hear is that she’d been thinking about him, and wanted to make contact, and didn’t know where he was; even several days later, it’s a little bit alarming to think about how quickly he’d simply shown up, how his first instinct had been to interpret her words as some kind of bat signal instead of a literary exercise. 

But the most concise version of the truth is just that, and so she repeats the words aloud: “To prove I could.” 

Jughead remains as he was, slumped over in his usual terrible posture with a claw-like hold on the rim of her old _Riverdale Register_ mug and his eyebrows loosely knit together. 

“I don’t regret moving back here,” she says; as always, she feels like she’s daring someone (Jughead, herself, anybody else who might be listening) to make her prove it. “I don’t. I just can’t help but wonder, sometimes, if I made the right choice. If coming back was the right choice.”

“You wanted to stay in New York?”

“I did and I didn’t. I… I loved working in publishing, but I couldn’t get a job that guaranteed any kind of advancement. I couldn’t even get a job that paid all my bills. It just felt like I wasn’t going anywhere. So I just pulled the plug on all of it, went for a master’s in education, and came back here.” 

“You do like teaching, though,” Jughead says; he doesn’t phrase it as a question. 

She nods. “I do. And I missed Riverdale. I missed living in a small town and being able to walk everywhere. I missed the river. I even missed the crazy weather, kind of. But then after I’d been here a little while, it started to feel… stifling, I guess? And that was kind of hard to deal with. You know I’m not great at admitting defeat.” 

At that, Jughead chuckles. “You’re _terrible_ at admitting defeat. You’re worse at admitting defeat than anyone I’ve ever met.” 

“Thanks.” She sticks her tongue out at him briefly. “Although, to be fair, this _wasn’t_ defeat anyway. So I thought, well, I don’t want to go back to New York. But if I can still get something _published…_ it was like giving myself another set of options. Does that make sense?”

Jughead nods, half at her and half at his mug. “If you still want to write, you can do it from Riverdale, and it doesn’t have to just be for the _Register_.” 

“Exactly.” 

“And you can,” he adds. “I don’t think I’ve said this yet—and granted, I’m biased towards both the author and the subject matter—but Betty, it’s _really_ good.” 

For some reason, the praise causes her to feel suddenly shy, and she looks down at her hands, wrapped around her own mug; she can’t see the scars. “Thank you.” And then, realizing she’s yet to ask him specifically, she takes a deep, slow breath, and says, “Why did you come here?”

Jughead tilts his head slightly, as though he finds the question strange. “I missed you. I read the essay, and it made me realize how much I missed you.” 

“You could’ve looked me up any time, Jug.” 

“I know. And I did think about it, sometimes.” He swirls his mug around, watching the liquid inside swish into a tiny tidal wave, ceasing the motion when the tea threatens to slosh over the edge. “I just… wasn’t sure you’d want me to.” 

“Of course I would have,” she says. “You know that, right?” 

Jughead nods, and then for some reason she nods too, and then she finds she has to stand up and leave the room to keep herself from doing something she might very well regret later. 

“I’ve got to go to bed.” She even stifles a fake yawn, which probably isn’t fooling him and definitely isn’t fooling her. “Good night, Jughead.” 

“Good night,” he echoes, and even though she can’t let herself look directly at him, she can nevertheless see, from the corner of her eye, that his expression is crestfallen.

  
  


In her bedroom, with her teeth dutifully brushed and her face dutifully washed and the lights out, she lies flat on her back with the covers pulled up to her chin and stares at the ceiling. 

_I can’t_ , she tells herself. _I can’t_. 

The clock on her bedside table ticks louder and louder and louder. 

She could, though. She so easily could. 

The clock ticks louder still, and she wonders if it’s trying to tell her that time is running out. 

She slips a hand under her shirt and lets it lay flat on her stomach for a moment. Then she pushes it up so that she’s cupping her own breast. There’s an empty ache inside of her that doesn’t have anything to do with sex, specifically. It’s not that she needs to get off; that, she can do just fine by herself. 

But that wouldn't be enough. Hasn’t been enough. Simply put, she misses being touched. 

Betty leaves her hand where it is for a couple minutes, then lets out a frustrated huff, tugs her shirt back into place, and flips onto her stomach. With any luck, this new position will quiet the nervous energy that seems to be bubbling within her. 

It does not. 

She turns over again.

  
  


In the morning, she wakes up with the thought that the problem is not that she doesn’t know Jughead anymore. She knows him just fine. There might be twelve years of his life with which she’s not intimately familiar, but she knows _him_. 

It’s still a bit of a relief when she doesn’t see him downstairs; she sends a silent thank-you up to the guest room, where Jughead is undoubtedly still asleep. Then she sits at the table with her coffee and her cereal and her tablet. Into the browser bar, she types “JF” and a space, and that’s as far as she needs to go before it autofills the URL of the only one of Jughead’s short stories that isn’t behind a paywall, the one she’s read five times already. 

For the sixth time in three days, she lets herself get lost in it. 

Her reverie is broken when the side door opens and the author himself appears in her kitchen, not only awake first thing in the morning but very obviously just returning from a run. Betty barely has time to minimize her browser window before he gets close enough to potentially recognize what’s on the screen, a move she makes so hastily that she almost knocks over the flower vase. 

“Morning,” he says, his voice a carefully studied neutral. 

“Morning,” Betty echoes. _Maybe I **don’t** know you at all_ , she thinks. 

She watches as he pulls a water glass from the cabinet and fill it from the Brita in her fridge. 

“Your birthday’s Friday,” she says casually, once he’s in the middle of a sip. 

Jughead does not choke, or do a spit take; he does look at her a little suspiciously as he swallows and then says, “Yeah, I know.” 

“Is it still a touchy subject, or…” 

He puts the water glass down and leans one hand on the counter. “I still don’t love it,” he admits, after a moment of thought. “I’m better at not short-circuiting over it.” 

“Do you still yell at people who bring you cupcakes?” 

“No. I stopped being _that_ much of an asshole,” he says, standing up straight and fidgeting with an invisible piece of lint on his shirtsleeve. Then he sighs. “Betty Cooper never forgets, huh?” 

“Juggie, I forgave you five minutes after you stopped yelling.” 

“I know,” he says. “I know.”

  
  


On her lunch break, she takes out her cell phone and stares hesitantly at Cheryl’s name in her favorites list. They haven’t spoken since Friday night, when Betty had called to tell Cheryl just how wrong she was about people in Riverdale reading the "Modern Love" column. She has a feeling that not immediately updating her cousin on the situation with people in Ohio reading the "Modern Love" column is going to earn her something between a sharp tongue-lashing and an actual roasting in dragon fire. 

Her thumb hovers over Cheryl’s name and then hits it, but before the call can go through, she changes her mind and hangs up. 

Instead she texts Jughead, asking only for a confirmation that he’ll still come talk to the _Blue and Gold_ staff tomorrow afternoon. 

_Of course_ , he writes back at once. _4pm, right?_

  
  


“We have a guest speaker coming tomorrow, by the way,” Betty announces to the newspaper staff. “I’ll expect everyone who doesn’t have a previous commitment to be here.” 

There’s a collective sharp intake of breath, and a squeaking of chair legs on old linoleum, and somewhere, from deep in the huddle, a half-whispered “I _told_ you Cameron was right.” 

Sabrina Spellman, the current editor-in-chief and also (perhaps not coincidentally) the student who’s always reminded Betty most of herself, stands up. “As co-captain of the River Vixens,” she says, rather solemnly, “I’m officially canceling tomorrow’s practice.” 

Betty suddenly feels very tired. “I didn’t tell you who the guest was,” she points out, but this seems to fall on deaf ears.

  
  


When she pulls into her driveway, she finds an old motorcycle _and_ an old pickup truck already parked there. 

“Hey, Betty,” Archie says casually when she enters the house, like it’s completely normal for him to be drinking a beer at her kitchen table at five o’clock on a Wednesday. “Want one?” 

“Sure,” she answers, without really thinking. Archie stands up to pull another bottle from the fridge, then pops the top and hands it to her. A third beer, she notices, is sweating away on the counter, apparently untouched. The kitchen smells like garlic and tomato sauce, and Jughead, who’s leaning against the counter by the stove, is wearing not only her oven mitts, but her frilliest apron as well. It’s warm in the kitchen, and he’s down to just one layer under the apron, a t-shirt with slightly fitted sleeves. 

The thought _this isn’t fair_ drifts unbidden through her mind, although what exactly is unfair in this situation, Jughead cooking for her or Jughead’s arms, remains unclear. 

Archie plops back into his previously vacated chair. “Did you know Jughead taught himself to cook?” 

“I did,” Betty says as she takes in the carnage: two empty jars of marinara and one empty tub of ricotta cheese, a skillet on the stovetop that seems to have recently held ground beef, a countertop lightly sprinkled with dried oregano and shredded mozzarella. 

“Jughead also taught himself to clean the kitchen, don’t worry,” Jughead says, pulling off the oven mitts. “You can put that towel down.” 

She hadn’t really realized she’d picked it up. “No, it’s—” 

“Betty.” His tone is pointed. “Sit.” 

Betty sits.

  
  


Archie leaves just before the lasagna comes out of the oven, citing a need to get home to his dad and Brigitte, and Betty finds herself inexplicably relieved to be rid of her oldest friend—even if he _was_ in a much better mood today. 

“What made you want to learn to cook?” she asks, as they sit down to eat. 

“What makes anyone want to learn to cook? Eating out all the time is too expensive.” He stares at his plate for a moment, and then adds, “And it’s kind of therapeutic. Not the actual cooking part—I don’t really like doing it—but just knowing I won’t be reliant on frozen food in the forthcoming zombie apocalypse.” 

Betty’s fork hovers above a piece of cucumber in the salad she’d insisted on making when she’d realized Jughead’s meal planning did not include a vegetable, and tries not to think about what it might mean that he doesn’t like cooking but has now cooked for her twice regardless (and this second meal, her brain duly adds, also involved grocery shopping). 

“Is a zombie apocalypse forthcoming?” 

“Any apocalypse, I guess.” He stabs a piece of lettuce, but doesn’t bring the fork to his mouth just yet. “When did the trailer park come down?” 

“A few years ago. Right before I moved back.” She pauses. “Did you go there today?”

Jughead nods, slowly. “Figured I might as well swing by and take a look—that was where I ran into Archie, incidentally. Kind of a shock to just see it _gone_.” 

“Yeah, I bet,” Betty says. She knows Jughead was never particularly fond of Sunnyside, but still, it must be weird to return to your childhood home only to discover that it doesn’t exist anymore, and even weirder to happen across your childhood best friend making plans to redevelop the land on which it once sat. 

“Do you know what happened?” 

“Not really. The south side… there was a lot of upheaval for the first couple of years after Clifford Blossom died. It turned out he was the major supplier for almost all the hard drugs. But Cheryl refused to be involved in that. So—well, I know not everyone on the south side was involved in drugs, but still. A lot of people just kind of migrated over to Greendale. That’s where the Serpents are now. Sunnyside was mostly empty when the land got sold.” 

“Yeah, I noticed the Whyte Wyrm looked shut down too,” he says, through a mouthful of salad. “Good riddance to _that_.” 

“My mom probably knows more about it, if you want to ask her. Not that her reporting was, you know, at all objective or nuanced.” She rolls her eyes. “But I’m pretty sure she talked to some people at the time. I assume she’ll be showing up unannounced in the next couple of days anyway. She usually does when she gets back from her cult visits.” 

For some time, Jughead silently contemplates his plate. Then he says, sounding almost amused, “This town is so much weirder than I used to think it was.” 

“Right?” Betty replies. “The whole Clifford Blossom thing alone is insane. And then you add in Jason and Polly, and my dad and Penelope, and…” 

Jughead doesn’t respond, except to study her face so intensely that she has to fight back a shiver.

  
  


They go for a walk after the kitchen is cleaned to what Jughead calls her “perfectionist standards,” this time on the road instead of through the woods. They talk about Archie again, and about their mothers, and then the conversation somehow shifts to ice cream. Jughead gently teases her for still preferring vanilla above all other flavors. His hand looks warm and inviting in the chilly fall air, like it’s open and waiting for hers. 

She thinks _I could get used to this_ and then, a few moments later, _oh, no, I already am_. 

“Jughead,” she says, interrupting a span of companionable silence. 

He looks at her, his face streaked with shadows but his eyes bright and clear. 

“What are your plans? Not for your whole life, I mean, but...” 

“I don’t know. I have another week of vacation time approved, but I don’t…” He runs a hand through his hair and then drops it back to his side, sighing heavily as he trails off. 

“Are you staying here?” 

Jughead stops walking. That hand, the same hand, lifts just an inch before falling back into place. 

“Should I?” he says, his voice so measured and so controlled that she almost can’t bear it. 

“Of course. I mean, if that’s what you want.” 

A slow, soft smile blooms across Jughead’s face, and Betty stuffs her hands into her jacket pockets, lest one of them accidentally brush against one of his.

  
  


Only a lifetime spent practicing careful compartmentalization keeps her from spontaneously combusting for the rest of the night. She goes to bed earlier than usual, and when she wakes up in the middle of the night and creeps downstairs for a glass of water, she pretends not to notice that the guest room light is on or that she can hear a rapid, almost frantic clacking of laptop keys.

  
  


She holds herself together until the end of the school day. She holds herself together until she’s in the _Blue and Gold_ office waiting for the students to arrive, and Jughead enters wearing a visitor’s badge, and she’s suddenly so overwhelmed by the feeling of being sixteen again that she actually has to sit down. 

Jughead circles the perimeter of the room, examining it almost reverently. 

“Is it exactly how you remember?” 

“Not exactly,” he says. “But it’s weird. It’s exactly how I thought it would look now.” 

She shoots him a puzzled look. 

“I knew you’d hang up different posters,” he says, gesturing to the wall that she’s covered in a basic AP style guide. “And I figured by now the computers would be newer.” 

“Barely.” She smiles a little as she watches him peruse the back shelves. “These at least connect to the internet.” 

Jughead looks up, an old magnifying glass now in hand, but before he can say anything, the door opens and a wave of students rushes in. He’s at her side at once, looking almost (but not quite) nervous. 

“Good afternoon, everyone,” she says. “I’d like to introduce you to an old friend of mine.”

At least three different students gasp.

  
  


Truth be told, Jughead is not a great guest speaker. Maybe, Betty thinks, he might have been better if he’d had more than a couple of days to prepare—but maybe not, since he seems exactly as uncomfortable around a group of high schoolers now as he did when he was one himself. 

But he talks about what he’d studied in college and how he’d landed his first job, and he talks about what it’s like to work in what so many people are calling a dead industry, and he even remembers to leave out the detail that the newspaper he works for is approximately one-third ads for porn shops. 

Truth be told, she finds it all more charming than she probably should. And the staff seems to enjoy the session—or at least, they all pay very close attention—but it’s not until they’re about to leave and Sabrina comes over to whisper “He’s really cute, Ms. Cooper” in Betty’s ear, with entirely too knowing a look on her face, that Betty realizes most of them were probably more interested in gossip than in career advice. 

“Thanks for coming,” she says, when they’re finally alone. “They’re good kids.” 

Jughead nods. “They have a good adviser.” 

_Better than we had?_ she almost asks, but stops just in time; their adviser was her mother, and that’s the last person in the world Betty wants to think about right now. She banishes all thoughts of Alice Cooper from her mind while Jughead takes a few steps across the room and plops into the chair that had always been his favorite. 

“Posters aside, this place really hasn’t changed at all,” he says, slouching low and putting his feet on the desk, and Betty takes a deep breath, drinking in the familiarity of the scene until she feels almost lightheaded. 

“It hasn’t,” she agrees. She perches herself on the edge of Jughead’s desk, crossing her legs at the ankles. “You even look just the same.” 

“I could make the illusion more complete, you know.” Jughead raises an eyebrow. “We could pretend we’re still in high school. I brought the beanie.” 

Betty has to stifle a giggle. “You didn’t.” 

“I did.” He’s grinning at her, but his tone is completely serious. “It’s at the bottom of my bag. I’ll go to the parking lot and pull it out right now, if you want. I’ll wear it on that date I was never brave enough to ask you on.”

The current between them is starting to feel very dangerous, but she can’t resist playing along. “A date, eh?” she says. “What was this date?” 

“Pop’s, obviously. Milkshakes. Where else would we have gone?” He pauses for a moment, studying her as though he’s trying to decide if whatever he wants to say next is a step too far. 

“What?” she asks. 

“Do you still have your cheerleading uniform?”

This time she really does laugh. “Oh, my god, Jughead. There’s no way that still fits.” 

Jughead seems genuinely confused by this statement, like it simply does not compute that she’s not the same size she was in high school. His baffled expression is so adorable, so endearing, that her last bit of resolve simply melts away. She’s drunk on him now, even though they’ve barely even touched, and what if, _what if_ , she simply stopped overthinking everything for once? 

(Then she wouldn’t be Betty Cooper, she thinks, somewhat ruefully.) 

“I don’t want to just… _fuck_ ,” she blurts out, the last word impossibly bitter as it spills from her mouth. “I don’t want to have a few days, and then that’s it, and we never see each other again.” 

“That won’t happen,” he says at once, swinging his legs to the floor. “We’ll see each other again, Betty. No matter what.” From the shaky tone in his voice, she thinks he might need the reassurance as much as she does; it’s possible, even, that he needs it more. “And I don’t—I don’t expect anything from you. You know that, right?” 

“I know,” Betty says quietly, holding eye contact as she slips off the desk. “But if it could be something else, would you want—”

She doesn’t need to finish the sentence. She _can’t_ finish the sentence. Finally, _finally_ , Jughead is out of his chair and kissing her, so deliberately and so thoroughly that her brain insists on cataloguing all the details—how his right hand cups her chin while two fingers slip into her hair, how his left arm wraps around her upper back, how his leg presses against hers just so, how the air in the room seems to still around them—how she can feel his heart beating steadily under the hand she’s placed on his chest—how his lips are soft and strong against hers—how their noses brush when he pulls away— 

It’s even better than she’d always imagined it would be. 

They stand there for a moment, still entwined, silent except for shallow, jagged breaths. Then she kisses him again. 

And again. 

And again. 

“It’s too much to say we should’ve done this years ago, isn’t it?” Jughead asks. 

Betty smiles. By now she’s back to sitting on the desk, both her arms wrapped tight around Jughead’s neck. “It is,” she murmurs, letting one of her hands slip down to his shoulder, then his bicep, then all the way down to his wrist. “But we should have.” 

He catches her hand in his and flips it over, gently opening her fingers to expose her palm. The reflex to clench her fist shut activates, as it always does when someone notices, but she successfully resists, and leaves her hand limp in his. Jughead’s breath catches a bit as he rubs a thumb over her scars. 

“There they are,” she sighs. She offers him a tiny smile; he doesn’t return it. 

“God, Betty,” he says instead. “That was—it was powerful imagery, the way you wrote it. Wearing your regrets on your skin. I just—I was really hoping it was _only_ imagery.” 

The corner of her mouth twitches up. “I was more of a mess than I let anyone see,” she says; Jughead's shaking his head _no_ before she can finish the brief sentence.

A strange and wonderful feeling rushes through her then, the feeling that she’s simultaneously a teenager and an adult, and that she has—that _they have_ —the chance to right so many wrongs. 

Thumb still tracing her heart line, he says, simply, “We all were.” Then he lifts her hand to his lips and presses four gentle kisses into her palm, one on each scar.

  
  


  
  


(to be continued…)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments are always appreciated, of course ;) 
> 
> (must get on the responses to those... in my defense, I've been writing the fic instead)


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to heartunsettledsoul and village-skeptic for reading through this!

He can’t stop staring at her hand. 

Not because of the faint line of crescent-shaped scars across her palm, though a sick sense of irony compels him to note that of _course_ the lasting evidence of Betty Cooper’s old self-harm habit is neatly organized. Much as he hates the thought of Betty ever feeling as though she needed to do something like this to herself—and he does hate it; he remembers seeing her clench her fists on occasion, and the memories make his stomach churn—the scars themselves really aren’t that bad. If he didn’t know they were there, if he hadn’t looked for them, he almost certainly wouldn’t have noticed. 

No, he can’t stop staring at her hand because there’s an unreasonably fascinating smudge of blue ink at the tip of her thumb. Because her hand still rests comfortably in his. Because her skin is warm and soft. 

He twines their fingers together, admiring Betty’s pretty pink nail polish as he does so. 

“Jug,” she says, slowly, “what are we doing?” 

He takes a deep breath. “We’re sitting in the _Blue and Gold_ office.” 

“That’s not what I meant.” 

“I know.” 

“We live hundreds of miles apart. It’s not just like—I mean, your life is where it is, my life is where it is. I don’t know what we do about that.” 

For lack of a better, more coherent response, Jughead nods.

“Do we try dating long-distance?” she continues, clearly thinking aloud. “I never have before, but I guess there’s no reason not to, except that…” 

He can follow her train of thought well enough. He _has_ done long distance, once. But that was so much different. He was in college then, and he’d gone back to Toledo for the summer while his girlfriend went home to Pittsburgh, both knowing they’d return to the same place in just a few months. Toledo and Pittsburgh were only four hours apart. They’d managed to see each other a couple of times over the break. It hadn’t been terribly hard. 

“Except that there’s no end in sight,” he says. But the alternative is not dating Betty, and that doesn’t seem like any kind of alternative at all. 

Betty, nodding in agreement, visibly deflates. “So what do we do? I just—I need some clarification. Before we go any further.” 

Only a week ago, Jughead was sitting at a desk in Toledo, typing up thoughts on a new fusion hot dog truck (his thoughts being, succinctly, that fusion hot dog trucks should not be a thing). He spent his days at a job that he’d begun thinking of as the equivalent of a Nutri-Matic Drink Dispenser, in that it was almost, but not quite entirely, unlike the career he’d hoped for. He spent about half his nights alone in his apartment either watching a movie or writing, and the other half out having some sort of experience to be later reviewed for the paper (for instance, tracking down and eating at a fusion hot dog truck). It had all seemed like a good enough way to live, right up until Betty’s essay landed metaphorically on his desk and reminded him that there was a whole wide world outside his comfortable, static little bubble. 

He looks up, raising an eyebrow when he catches her eye. “So you do want to go further?” 

“Jughead,” she says, clearly only half amused. 

“Sorry.” 

He studies their fingers, still linked together, and knows his mind has been made up the whole time. 

“I want to try,” he says, the words coming out with such force that they almost echo around the empty room. “I don’t know how we make this work. But I’m tired of asking myself ‘what if.’ So whatever you want to do, whatever road you want to take—” 

He intends to end the sentence with _I’m yours_ , but Betty suddenly looks so overwhelmed she might cry, and he kisses her again instead. 

When they break apart, Betty moves her forehead to his cheek and rests it there for a moment before pulling back to look him in the eye. 

“Okay.” She sounds nervous, but resolute. “I’m in. Let’s do it.” 

Late-afternoon sunlight streams through the same wooden blinds that still don’t close, dust particles float indiscriminately through the air, and just like that, Betty Cooper is his girlfriend. It’s a strange sensation, strange but wonderful, his whole body quiet but alert, like he drank way too much coffee but the caffeine only made him calmer. 

Their fingers are _still_ entwined. Jughead lifts his hand slightly, and Betty’s comes with it. 

“So,” he says. “You wanna go to Pop’s?” 

Betty tilts her head back and stares at him like she thinks he’s gone right off the deep end. “ _No_ ,” she says, laughing through the word. “I don’t want to go anywhere I might run into one of my students.” 

“Greendale, then?” He has no idea what’s even in Greendale these days, but there’s got to be a nice little restaurant somewhere, maybe the kind that dims its lights and puts tea lights on the tables, the kind that won’t mind the fact that the only clothes he packed for the trip were jeans and flannel shirts and casual sweaters… 

“Um. Can we maybe just go home?” She gives his hand a gentle tug, and with a dizzying, swooping rush, Jughead realizes her immediate intention is not to heat up the leftover lasagna.

  
  


He’s never been so anxious to get anywhere in his life. Only the fact that he’s following Betty back to her house keeps him from speeding across the streets of Riverdale… well, from speeding _more_. 

“Drive safely,” she’d said, in the parking lot. “I want you in one piece.” 

As he zips along, the old motorcycle unusually responsive between his legs, he can’t help but think they’ve just thrown everything _safe_ right out the window. 

He’s following Betty, and Betty is definitely speeding too.

  
  


They barely make it into the kitchen. Betty slams the side door behind her with such force that its panes of inset decorative glass rattle, and doesn’t bother to lock it before practically launching herself at him. 

“We’re doing this?” He gasps the words into the bare, soft skin of her throat, just above the silver chain of her necklace. 

Betty lets out a strangled sort of hiccup, and swats him on the shoulder. “ _Yes_ ,” she tells him. “God, yes.” She takes a deep breath, and he feels her tense up. 

He starts to repeat what he’d said (and meant) at the school, that this won’t be a one-time thing for him, that it already isn’t—but Betty quickly interrupts. 

“No, not that. Just, is there anything I should know? We haven’t had the ‘responsible adult’ talk.” 

_I will fall in love with you_ , Jughead thinks: it’s not a promise, not a prophecy, just the truth. She should probably know that, and fairly soon, but he knows that’s not what she was asking. 

He shrugs. Jughead is by no means a monk or a prude, but since he doesn’t sleep with people he doesn’t like and he doesn’t like very many people, his list of sexual partners is a fairly short one and he has never been irresponsible with anybody. There are a couple of condoms in his wallet, but they belong to the category of things that are there for no particular reason, like his rewards card from a sub shop that closed a year ago or the single three-cent stamp that he doesn’t remember buying. 

(They have an abbreviated version of the talk on their way up the stairs, and he is not surprised to learn that Betty has always been responsible, too.)

  
  


When they get to her bedroom, Betty pushes the door open without looking, leads him inside, steps out of her shoes, and then goes right back to kissing him. 

One by one, the layers come off. First Betty pushes off his leather jacket, which he hadn’t even consciously realized he was still wearing; then he’s suddenly unbearably warm, and strips away his sweater; finally she tugs at the hem of his t-shirt, lifting it up until it gets stuck and he has to wrestle out of it himself. 

Betty puts both her hands flat on his chest and regards them there for a moment. One index finger curls, stroking over a mole. “Juggie?” Her voice is almost—almost, but not quite—shy. 

“Hmm?” 

“You’re really hot, did you know that?” 

He’s heard as much before, once or twice, but it’s somehow never seemed to matter. Not until now. Now, he wraps his arms around Betty and scoops her right off the floor. 

“Yeah?” he says, the word coming out muffled, thanks to his face being gloriously pressed against her chest.

“Oh, my god, what are you doing?” she shrieks, as he carries her over to the bed and tosses her lightly on top of her blue floral comforter. 

Somehow, none of _her_ clothes have come off yet. Her cardigan wasn’t buttoned to begin with; Betty shrugs it off and throws it on the floor before getting to work on her shirt buttons. 

“Hold on,” Jughead says, and she pauses mid-button, a questioning look in her eyes. “I want to.” 

Betty nods. 

He works his way down one button at a time, kissing each newly exposed patch of skin as it appears until her blouse is open enough to expose her bra: emerald green lace, not a color he recalls having ever seen her wear before, but one he immediately thinks she should wear more often. He kisses across the tops of her breasts and gets temporarily lost there, gently palming one and then the other, and looks up only when Betty squirms under him. 

“Don’t stop,” she whispers, and so he doesn’t, not until he’s claimed every inch of her, down to the navel. She shudders when he kisses there, pulling her stomach in slightly, and scoots up enough to reach behind her and unzip her skirt. 

Jughead hooks a finger into the loosened waistband. “Can I take this off?” 

“Only if I can take off your pants,” she says, a teasing smile blooming across her face. 

He inhales sharply, suddenly light-headed, and assesses the situation. 

He’s in Betty Cooper’s bedroom, and she’s about to strip down to her underwear. He’s kneeling on the edge of her bed, shirtless, and she’d called him hot and asked to take his pants off. He’s got one hand on her skirt and the other at the smallest part of her bare waist. The situation is nearly all of his earliest, most vivid fantasies come to life, and for a few seconds, it’s all a bit too much to process. 

He wants to make her forget all the reasons she’s ever wanted to curl her fingernails into her palms. He wants to make her forget what she had for breakfast this morning. He wants to make her forget everything in the world except him. 

“Not yet,” he says, giving her skirt a tug. “Not _yet.”_

Betty takes her skirt off the rest of the way, then sits cross-legged on the bed. “Juggie.” 

“Will you—” 

“ _No_ ,” she says, reaching for his belt. “Come on, Jug. Do you really think I’m going to let you do all the work?” 

He wants to tell her that this is hardly _work_. He wants to tell her that he’s a little bit terrified of screwing this up, of not making it good for her—not that he doesn’t know what he’s doing, he does, but the stakes have never been higher and the more he’s thinking of her and not himself, the better he’ll—the _longer_ he’ll—

But she’s undoing his belt buckle with that smile, _that smile_ , and she’s so goddamned beautiful that he can’t think of a counterargument.

  
  


And so, they figure things out. Together. 

When he finally unrolls one of the inexplicable condoms and sinks into her (only after she’s already come once; he at least won _that_ argument), there are no fireworks. He doesn’t see shooting stars, or even regular ones. He sees only Betty, and she is more than enough.

  
  


Betty heats up leftovers while he’s showering, and he sits at her kitchen table with yesterday’s lasagna and an odd sensation in the pit of his stomach, like his body’s decided for him that never again in his life will he need or want to use a safety net. All she put on after her shower was a knee-length, silky robe, and on the expanse of skin left uncovered by its deep v-neck, he spies a small bruise just under her collarbone and almost snorts. 

A hickey. He’s left a hickey on her, exactly as though…

(Well, he’d never given _anyone_ a hickey in high school.) 

“You will let me take you on a real date tomorrow night, right?” he asks, before digging in. 

She leans forward, tucking a strand of damp hair behind her ear. “I’d like that,” she says. “I’d like that a lot.”

  
  


“Jug.”

She’s cuddled against him, heavy and warm in his arms, and he doesn’t ever want to leave this couch. 

“I’m falling asleep. I think I need to go to bed. Um, do you want to sleep in my bed tonight? You don’t have to,” she adds, quickly. 

He smiles into the top of her head, nuzzling a gentle kiss into her hair. “Not that I don’t appreciate the pull-out couch,” he tells her, “but that’s a really stupid question.” 

Betty pushes up to a sitting position, and Jughead’s chest instantly aches at the absence of her. “Well, I didn’t _know_. You could be one of those people who hates sharing a bed,” she says. “You could be vehemently anti-snuggling.” 

“What were we just doing?” 

“Maybe you were humoring me.” 

“I wasn’t,” he says. Sex is great—he’s not going to deny that, especially not now—but waking up with someone he cares about right there, close enough to touch, is sometimes even better. “I definitely wasn’t.”

  
  


She’s half asleep, lovely and relaxed against her pillows, when Jughead is suddenly so _overcome_ with her that there’s nothing for it but to kiss her again. Betty threads a hand through his hair and tugs him closer. 

“I have to get up in the morning,” she says, after a couple of minutes of unhurried making out. 

Jughead drops his lips to her neck, just under her ear, and kisses across to the hollow of her throat before he pushes up on one elbow. “Do you want me to stop?” 

“No.” It’s almost a plea. “Don’t stop.” 

This time, she lets him do all the work. Almost.

  
  


“Betty?” 

She rolls over to look at him instead of reaching over to turn out the bedside light. 

It’s a stupid question, he knows that; stupid and needy in a way he doesn’t want to be. But he has to ask. 

“This is good so far, right?” 

“Of course it is,” she says at once. 

After she turns out the light, she reaches for his hand under the blankets, tugging it closer until his palm is flat atop her bare thigh, a place he’ll happily let it rest for all eternity. Betty traces his wrist, his thumb, his knuckles before simply covering his hand with hers. 

“Juggie? Can I ask you something really dumb?” 

“Shoot,” he says. He thinks he’ll answer anything. 

“When did you stop wearing your hat all the time?” 

“College. Junior year of college.” 

She goes back to playing with his fingers. In the silence, he can practically hear her brain whirring with all the possibilities of why he’d finally abandoned his longtime sartorial security blanket: whether it had something to do with a relationship or another major life event she doesn’t know about, or whether he’d just woken up one morning and realized he didn’t need it anymore. 

The truth is considerably less dramatic than even the last scenario. 

“It got a hole,” he says. 

“It got a _hole_?”

“It got a hole,” he confirms. “There’s a seam, you know? By the pins. It unraveled. I tried to sew it up, but it looked stupid.” 

“It got a hole,” Betty repeats, sounding far too amused. “Poor Juggie. You must have been devastated.” 

“I _was_ ,” he says, playing along even though he had, in fact, been devastated at the time. “It was winter. My head got cold.” 

“Did you ever replace it? I mean, just for the purposes of keeping your head warm? I know you could never really replace that particular hat.” 

“My mom gave me a new hat for Christmas that year. It was awful. I never wore it.” He sighs for dramatic impact. “I’m a one-hat man, Betts.” 

She lets out a little snort of a laugh, then falls silent for so long he starts to think she’s fallen asleep. 

“Jug?”

“Hmm?”

“It’s not such a loss, you know,” she says. “You have really great hair.” 

She squeezes his hand, and his heart squeezes in return, over and over until he tips over the edge of consciousness and into dreams of her.

  
  


Jughead has never been a big fan of birthdays, not birthdays in general and not his birthday in particular. 

He’d explained why to Betty, once, on the occasion of his fifteenth. That was the first year Archie’s football commitments trumped their double feature at the Bijou. In one of his many “it’s the thought that counts” overtures, the kind that made Jughead wonder whether his best friend really knew him at all, Archie had attempted to rectify the situation not by telling Jughead he couldn’t make the actual day and offering to go to the Bijou at a more convenient time, but by mentioning nothing to Jughead and sending Betty to the Bijou in his stead. Jughead had already been more than half in love with her at that point, and when he’d walked up to the theater only to find her there, smiling sweetly at him with tickets and extra-large popcorn already in hand, he’d come close to spontaneously combusting. 

The ensuing not-a-date was a more exquisitely painful torture than he could ever have dreamed up for himself. Betty sat next to him, of course, and the flickering projector light illuminated her shoulders _just so_ ; he’d spent the entire first movie imagining what it would be like to drape his arm around them, and the entire second movie sitting on his own left hand so he wouldn’t be tempted to try. 

Afterwards, they’d started walking to Pop’s, just the two of them. 

“I tried to arrange a little party for you,” Betty said, apologetically. “But Archie—well, you know, and Kevin’s visiting his mom this weekend, and I didn’t think you’d want Jason there so I couldn’t invite Polly—there’s no way she wouldn’t bring him—and, well…” 

Miraculously, he’d managed to keep himself from exploding as he demanded to know why on earth she thought he would want something like that. The exact words she’d babbled in explanation have long since been lost to him, but he can still remember the stricken look on her face when he’d finally cracked and told her, in no uncertain terms, that she shouldn’t have come to the Bijou in the first place, that it was all a mistake, that she ought to just go home. 

The whole thing was mostly Archie’s fault for telling her about his birthday, but it was also hers for trying to make his birthday into a _thing_ when all the evidence was that he didn’t want it to be one, and (he only recognized this consciously long after the fact) it was Jughead’s fault too—for being the loner weirdo who had so few friends that it was impossible to even assemble a full booth at Pop’s to celebrate.

Betty Cooper always gave as good as she got, though. “Don’t be ridiculous, Jughead,” she’d said. She’d kept marching him all the way down to Pop’s, and she’d ordered for the both of them and paid for _that_ , too.

The next year, Archie was free again. Betty did not invite herself to the Bijou. She brought cupcakes to school, only one of which was decorated even a little bit, and did not otherwise acknowledge that this day was different from any other. 

But that was the year of the motorcycle license and the leather jacket, and he was so on edge by the time the cupcakes appeared that he’d managed to lose his shit and yell at her anyway. 

She forgave him.

  
  


His twenty-ninth birthday starts with the chirp of an alarm clock, the creaking of a mattress, and the sensation of somebody climbing on top of him. 

He opens his eyes, and _god_ , it’s a sight to behold. 

“Happy birthday, Juggie,” Betty says. “What do you want this year?” 

If every birthday began with Betty Cooper straddling him while clad only in soft lace panties and a matching lace-trimmed camisole, loose waves of hair cascading over her shoulders, a gleam in her eye suggesting that what happened twice last night is about to happen a third time this morning, well—

Well, he might actually learn to like his birthday. 

He scrambles to sit up, but Betty shakes her head and presses her hands to his shoulders, pinning him to the mattress. 

“Last night was amazing,” she says. “But this time, let me.” 

She ducks down and kisses him, long and slow, while she rocks her hips against him. 

Jughead reaches for her waist with both hands, intending to shift her; the second time, last night, she’d made a very particular, very interesting noise when he did a certain thing to her nipple with his mouth, and what he wants for his birthday is to make her make that noise again, as soon as possible. 

She breaks the kiss, pulling back just slightly, and he feels a single laugh go through her body. 

“Uh-uh,” Betty whispers. “I said, _let me_.” There’s a brief pause, and then she adds, “Last night _was_ amazing. Really. But I’m kind of sore, so…” She smiles. “Pretty please?” 

Jughead’s only too aware that in his happiest, most unreserved moments, his facial expressions tend towards the unfortunately goofy. At the moment, he does not give a damn. 

“Okay,” he agrees. A little thrill runs down his spine as Betty presses her lips together and raises her eyebrows in a look he can only describe as _naughty_. “What am I in for?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out.” She swallows, then, and quickly adds, “Nothing weird. I promise. But if there’s something you don’t like, tell me, okay?” 

Thoughts about what Betty might consider weird (and whether she wants to do any of those things to him, and whether there’s anything she could possibly do that he wouldn’t like) pop into his mind at once, but his only response is to nod. 

“Good,” she says. 

He likes everything she does to him.

“I have to go to work,” she says, rather apologetically, when he makes another attempt at snuggling. 

“We’re still on for tonight, right?” 

Betty nods. “I’m all yours.” 

Though he feels like he ought to get up if she has to, he doesn’t. He pulls her pillow closer and snuggles with that instead, drifting back to sleep with the smell of her in his nostrils and the ghosts of her hands all over his body.

  
  


He wakes up a few hours later, when his phone rings. It takes a while for him to find said phone, and he stumbles nude around Betty’s bedroom until he finds it, still in the pocket of yesterday’s pants. The battery is down to less than ten percent, but—well, if he has to call his sister back later, she’ll understand. 

He thinks she’ll understand. 

She’ll have to understand. 

He taps to accept the call, and then says, “Hey, J.B.”

“Hey. Happy birthday.” 

“Thanks.” Jughead looks around the room for his boxers; obviously J.B. can’t see him, but it still feels strange to talk to her without any clothes on. Thankfully, he finds them without too much trouble, and tucks the phone against his chin so he can pull them on. 

“You don’t sound awake,” J.B. says. “Did I wake you up?” 

“Kind of.” 

“It’s late. Does that mean you took the day off for once?” 

“Um…” he starts. A slow realization is forming in his head. 

“Good. If you’re not at work, we can go to the movie earlier, maybe even make a matinee. What did you want to see? I’m voting no on the Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson explosion-fest, but it’s up to you, of course—” 

“Yeah, no,” he says. “Actually, can we reschedule?” 

(She’ll understand. 

He thinks she’ll understand. 

She’ll have to understand...)

There’s a slight pause, during which he thinks he can hear his sister blinking. “You’re rescheduling your birthday?” 

“I’m not in town. I, uh… I took an impulsive road trip.”

“Okay,” J.B. says, slowly drawing out the word. “That’s unlike you. Where’d you go?” 

“Um.” He swallows. “Riverdale.” 

For as much time as Jughead’s spent in his life worrying that he might be too much like his father, sometimes he thinks J.B. actually got the worst of F.P.’s traits. He loves his sister, but like their father, she’s too _quick_ —too quick to trust, too quick to pick a fight, too quick to give up when the going gets rough. 

(Too quick, he fears, to pick up a bottle. But he can’t think about that now.) 

“ _Riverdale_?” she says, her voice filled with disbelief. “Why? And why didn’t you tell me? And—you know what? Birthday or not, fuck you.” 

“J.B.—” he starts. But she’s quick to hang up the phone, too. He calls her back right away, but he’s not surprised when she doesn’t pick up. 

Nor is he surprised when she calls back twenty minutes later, quick to apologize for overreacting. 

“But seriously, Jughead,” she says, “why _are_ you in Riverdale?” 

“Did you read last week’s ‘Modern Love’ column in the _New York Times_?” (He knows she didn’t.) 

“What the hell is the ‘Modern Love’ column?”

“Okay,” he sighs. “Do you remember Betty Cooper?” 

When he’s done explaining it all, J.B. is silent for a good long while. “That’s insane,” she says, finally, and then, “But you’re _dating_ her now? How is that going to work?” 

“We’re figuring it out.” 

She’s silent for another long moment, and then—because she’s his sister, and whatever else might be going on between them at any given moment, they’ve always been careful to fulfill their familial obligations to each other—she says, “I’m telling Mom.”

  
  


When his mother calls a few hours later to wish him a happy birthday, she brings up neither the _New York Times_ nor his current location.

  
  


He will not, he decides, let this bother him. Not today.

  
  


Thanks to the small-town gossip chain (or really, Brigitte seeing an extra-chipper Betty in the teacher’s lounge, putting two and two together, and calling Archie with instructions to pass along the name of a restaurant in Centreville that she knows Betty’s been wanting to try; it’s one he’d already found online, and put on his list to consider), he’s confident he’s at least planned a decent enough date for the night. He knows Betty doesn’t want to go out in Riverdale, but the chosen restaurant doesn’t have much of a dessert menu, and he hopes she’ll be amenable to swinging by Pop’s for a milkshake afterwards. 

(He’ll pull the “but it’s my birthday” card on that one, if he has to. It’s not a Riverdale birthday without a Pop’s milkshake.) 

In the afternoon, he takes a quick and unpleasant run to make sure he gets some sunlight, and to buy a bouquet of fresh flowers, ones that definitely mean something. He checks his phone when he gets out of the shower afterwards—Betty should be home fairly soon—and is standing in the guest room with a towel wrapped around his waist, contemplating his meagre clothing options, when he hears the front door open and shut. 

“Upstairs,” he calls. “Be down in a minute.” 

He hears footsteps coming up the stairs, muffled by the carpeting. They stop in front of the open door. 

“How was—” 

The word _school_ drops away as soon as Jughead turns around. He clutches tightly at his towel, feeling suddenly like he’s a surprised cartoon character, or maybe that he’s been thrown headlong into a terrible romantic comedy. 

“My day? Oh, my day was _fine_ until I pulled into my daughter’s driveway to see a motorcycle I thought had died an ignoble death years ago parked there.” 

Alice Cooper has aged perhaps two days in the last eleven years. He wonders, absurdly, if she practices some kind of witchcraft. 

“Forsythe Pendleton Jones... the Third,” she says, every part of his name laden with ice. She crosses her arms over her chest and flicks her eyes up and down his body. “Please, by all means. Explain yourself.”

  
  
  
  


(to be continued...)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, everyone, for continuing to support this story! It would mean a lot if you left a comment.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to village_skeptic for helping me get this to the church (whether it got to the church on time is up for some debate. Sorry for the delay! I had good reasons, I promise).

Betty Cooper has always liked evidence. 

Evidence determines what’s true and what’s false, what’s known and unknown. She asks her students for textual evidence in their analyses and for verifiable evidence in their _Blue and Gold_ articles. Sometimes she even likes the scars on her palms, likes that the skin there is a little thicker, a little paler, because the scars are evidence too: eight tiny, tangible reminders that she’s _better_ , now, than she used to be. 

And so she does not mind at all that her body currently carries evidence of a different kind—a soreness between her thighs, a telltale bruise just under one collarbone. In fact, it might be some of the best evidence she’s ever collected. 

She’s pretty sure she’ll collect more of it tonight. The plans for their official first date are still a mystery to her, but—as she thinks on her drive home—the plans don’t really matter. Just the fact that she’s going on a date at all feels strangely revelatory; it’s been almost a year since she gave up on the last of the dating apps, and she hasn’t met anyone in one of the more traditional ways in even longer. 

(Apparently, all she had to do was lay bare some of the darkest secrets of her soul in a major publication for all the world to see.)

So maybe even she thinks it’s a little bit silly, how much she’s looking forward to going on a date, a _real_ date; after all, they’ve already both agreed they’re in a relationship and had several rounds of extremely pleasurable sex. But, at the same time, her heightened anticipation doesn’t seem silly at all. It just feels right. 

Mostly—and she wants to tell him this, at some point tonight—mostly, she’s glad she decided to give this thing with Jughead a chance, even as she’s still not one hundred percent sure what that means. 

She pulls onto her street to see an all-too-familiar station wagon parked in her driveway. 

“Mother…” she mutters, between gritted teeth. Adding _fucker_ would both be superfluous and make the outburst inaccurate.

  
  


In the living room, she finds Jughead on the sofa and her mother in the side chair, both sitting with arms crossed tightly over their chests. 

Alice gets the first word in. “Elizabeth,” she says, clipping all four syllables. “You didn’t inform me you were entertaining a houseguest this week.” 

“It’s nice to see you too. How was the cult?” 

“The _commune_ is lovely this time of year, as you would know if you ever agreed to visit with me. I’ve brought you some ravioli that the children and I made together, butternut squash and dandelion green—” 

Her mother stops talking as soon as Betty sits down on the couch, as close to Jughead as possible, and drapes an arm across his shoulders. 

“Go on, Mom.” 

“So this is exactly what it looks like,” Alice says. “May I have a word _in private_ , dear?” 

“You may not,” Betty says. “We can talk here. Or you could leave, actually. Jughead and I have plans.” She turns to him. “How was your day, Jug?” 

“Great,” he says. “Really peachy.” 

Betty’s mother stands up, throws back her shoulders, and takes a deep breath; Betty, knowing she has no other choice, does the same. So does Jughead. 

She glances back at him when she feels his hand on the small of her back; he raises his eyebrows and gives her a little shrug. 

“Do you want me to leave you two alone?” 

“Yes,” says Alice.

“ _No_ ,” says Betty. “We’re not going to fight about this, are we, Mother?” 

“Certainly not,” Alice agrees. “We’re going to have a _discussion_.”

  
  


She’s fought about boyfriends with her mother before. She’s fought with her mother about boyfriends she never even _had_ ; still, to this day, Alice can’t resist the urge to lob an insult or two at Archie when the occasion arises. Almost no one is good enough for Alice’s younger daughter. Conversely, when someone _is_ good enough for Betty, in the eyes of Alice Cooper, Betty becomes deficient. When there’s no one at all in the picture, her mother likes to drop vague statements about spinster aunts and old maids, as though being unmarried at twenty-eight is both unheard of and shameful. 

There is simply no winning this game, and Betty has yet to figure out how to stop playing it. This particular round may be the worst yet; Alice doesn’t usually go full tilt when the boyfriend in question is standing in the room. Today, however, seems to be an exception. Ten full minutes into the fight, Betty’s already-thin patience has been worn to its absolute limit. 

“Mom.” She knows full well that the so-called teacher voice does not work on Alice Cooper, but she has no more effective strategy right now. “It was what, two weeks ago that you were telling me I need to, quote, ‘get back on the horse’ before I ‘forget how to ride’?” 

“When I said that, Elizabeth, my intent was not for you to immediately begin shacking up with an underdressed out-of-state miscreant! If you’re going to waste the last of your youth, you might as well try to find someone local.” 

“Oh, my god, Mom. Enough.” Betty pushes two fingers into her temple, right into the throbbing vein that’s currently threatening to pulse right through her skin. “The rest of my youth is not being wasted. Jughead isn’t a miscreant. I don’t want any leftover butternut squash and dandelion green ravioli! I want to go upstairs and change into something that’s maybe a little bit sexy, and then I want to go on the date Jughead planned, and what happens after that date is absolutely none of your business.” 

Her mother’s face remains maddeningly implacable. “Well, if that’s what you want,” she says, using a voice of her own, the I’m-your-mother reverse psychology voice that stopped working on Betty over a decade ago. “If that’s what you’re sure you want, far be it from me to stop you.” 

“Just go, Mom,” Betty sighs, and miraculously enough, Alice Cooper does. 

She and Jughead both watch in silence until Alice is in her car and safely away, and then they turn to each other. 

“What did she mean, ‘underdressed’?” Betty wonders aloud. True, Jughead’s jeans and sweater are nothing fancy, but they look nice on him. 

He winces. “Let’s not go there.” 

“I’m sorry,” she says. It’s not even her occasional compulsion to apologize talking; she is, genuinely, sorry for whatever Jughead went through. “I’m sorry she just came over like that. She’s my mom, we live in the same town, it would be weird for her not to have a spare key…” 

“It’s fine, Betty.” 

“You don’t look fine.”

“Okay, fine,” he concedes. “I’m annoyed this date I’ve wanted to go on for what feels like my whole life is off to a bad start. But your mom’s not a dealbreaker, Betty. I already knew what she’s like.” He leans in to give her a kiss, one that starts soft and gentle but quickly intensifies. Both his hands come to cradle her face, palms flat against her jaw, and Betty’s heart gives the the same little thrill it gave her yesterday, the one that’s already starting to feel like the most exciting kind of familiar. 

“Jug,” she breathes, “we’re never going to make it on the date if you—” 

With a little nod and an even smaller chuckle, he swipes a thumb across her cheek. “Are you ready to go?” 

She takes a step back. “No, are you kidding? Please tell me I have time to change.” 

“Yeah, there’s plenty of time. Our reservation’s not until seven.” Jughead sounds confused. “You want to?” 

Betty glances down at her teaching clothes—a mostly shapeless blouse she’d chosen for its high collar, a boring knee-length skirt, sensible shoes—and wonders whether they’re seeing the same thing. A quick peek at Jughead’s face confirms that they are not. He’s looking at her like she’s wearing something worthy of a Victoria’s Secret catalog, which she isn’t, not even under her boring, responsible, decidedly un-sexy ensemble. 

“You think this is a date outfit?” she says, a little teasingly. 

He fingers the waistband of her skirt. “It could be.” 

“Jughead.” 

Jughead raises his hands in concession, and she hurries up to her bedroom before things can go any farther.

  
  


Upstairs, she changes into much nicer lingerie, which she then covers with a dress she bought months ago but has yet to find the occasion to wear. It’s a black dress, little but not _too_ little, sleeveless, with a moderately low v-neck and a fun swishy skirt. It is, as she’d threatened to her mother, maybe a little bit sexy. 

Maybe. Dressing to be sexy has never come effortlessly to Betty, despite all the coaching she’s received, first from Veronica and then from Cheryl. Too much, and she feels like a different person, a split personality. Sometimes, in the past, she’s found that fun. But tonight…

Tonight, she wants to feel wholly like herself. 

She switches her sensible school shoes for a higher heel, upgrades her eye makeup from neutral to smoky and her lipstick from a pale gloss to a bold red, and blends concealer into that bruise Jughead left under her collarbone. The bruise refuses to disappear completely, but she doesn’t really mind its visibility too much, and she has the feeling Jughead won’t mind at all. 

Jughead nearly leaps up from the couch when she re-enters the living room, a fresh bouquet of flowers in his hands. This bouquet is bigger than the one he’d bought her earlier in the week, or maybe not _bigger_ , but brighter and more exuberant. Still, though, her focus is on him. Early last night, as their first go-round had just gotten underway, there had come a point at which Jughead had looked simply overwhelmed at the sight of her; he’s wearing the same expression now, like he can’t quite believe this is happening, and she almost hates how much she likes having that kind of power over him. 

(Even if she still can’t quite believe it’s happening, either.) 

“For you, m’lady.” He holds the flowers out to her. “And— _god_.” 

She takes the bouquet. “Like the dress?” she asks, giving it a little twirl. “It has pockets.” 

Instead of complimenting her, he simply swallows. Betty watches his Adam’s apple bob, waits another moment for him to speak—in vain, as it turns out—and feels a tingly sort of warmth diffuse over her whole body when she realizes he’s very literally speechless: him, Jughead Jones, who’s never once been without some kind of smartass, sardonic retort. 

The lack of words means so much more than actual words would, really; Betty finds she can’t quite stop herself from grinning. 

“You look nice too,” she says. She gives him a kiss on the cheek. “And so do the flowers. You already put them in a vase?” 

“Seemed silly not to.” He shrugs one shoulder; Betty fights down the urge to kiss him again. “We’re kind of doing everything in the wrong order anyway. Arranging your flowers for you seems like the least of it.” 

She gives the bouquet a deep sniff, as one does, and then puts it on the coffee table. “It’s not the wrong order, Jug,” she says. “Not if it works.”

  
  


Outside, in the driveway, she walks up to Jughead’s bike and trails her fingertips along the seat. “I guess we can’t take this, huh?” 

“You’d want to?” Jughead asks, an amused smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “Have you ever been on a motorcycle?” 

“Nope.” 

She hasn’t even thought about riding a motorcycle since high school, when she had occasionally allowed herself brief fantasies of zipping along on the back of this very one, snuggled against his back with her arms wrapped around his waist as the two of them crouched low against the wind. Between her belief that her crush was unrequited and her knowledge of what her mother would do if she ever found out Betty had engaged in an activity as dangerous as riding a motorcycle—let alone riding a motorcycle _with a boy_ —she’d always felt it best to keep those fantasies from going too far. 

Now, though—now she doesn’t just want to imagine it. She wants to do it. She wants to do it even in her dress and heels, even though she knows her hair would be completely frightful upon arrival. She wants to ride Jughead’s motorcycle right past her mother’s house, rev the engine so the whole block can hear, and extend a big, fat middle finger at the front windows. 

(Which Jughead might actually like to help her do, come to think of it. She never _will_ do it, of course, but it’s nice to imagine a world in which she might.) 

“I don’t have a second helmet,” he says, and Betty comes crashing back down to earth.

  
  


It’s a good date. A great date, even. He directs her to a restaurant in Centreville she’s wanted to try since it opened a few months ago; the food is good if not spectacular, and they fight over the check (she would concede more easily if today wasn’t Jughead’s birthday). The date ends with her car parked in the darkest corner of Pop’s parking lot and the two of them crammed awkwardly in the backseat of said car, with Jughead’s hand up her skirt and two milkshakes melting in the cupholders while they laugh about how dumb all of it is. 

“We are adults, right?” Betty wonders aloud. The night is mild, and her car windows haven’t fogged up at all. She considers this a somewhat disappointing answer to the question of whether or not that’s really a thing that happens. 

“Yeah,” Jughead says, pulling his face out of where it’s been buried in her neck to give her a cheeky grin. Pinkish neon light filters through her car windows, landing gently on Jughead’s skin, illuminating freckles she’d never noticed until last night. “But it’s my birthday, and I want to make out with you in the backseat of your car.” 

He’d so rarely smiled when they were younger. That he seems so uninhibited, so _happy_ now is enough to make her giddy, and _almost_ enough to make her forget that she really should not be getting to third base in Pop’s parking lot.

“We’re doing a little bit more than making out, Jug.” She sits up as best she can and deliberately widens her eyes, hoping the neon glow is working as well for her as it is for him. “Wouldn’t you rather go back to my house?”

  
  


They go back to her house. 

Last night had been fun, undoubtedly, and more than satisfying. But it was also just the slightest bit awkward here and there, and a little nerve-wracking. What if, she’d wondered, _what if_ they turned out to not be sexually compatible after all? Betty couldn’t imagine they wouldn’t be, but even she knew she couldn’t orgasm through sheer force of will. 

Her fears were, mercifully, unfounded. Maybe all the pent-up tension, the years of anticipation, had made her pleasure that much easier to obtain. 

But—as she quickly discovered last night—apart from all of that, Jughead is _very_ good in bed. He’d kissed her in ways that made the most overwrought kinds of clichéd romance novel metaphors spring to mind. He’d looked so gloriously happy as he unbuttoned her blouse that Betty completely forgot to suck in her stomach. 

“Can I pull the birthday card one more time?” he asks now as he’s unlacing his boots from her bedroom armchair, his tone awfully casual for someone who has always hated his birthday. 

(This morning’s “happy birthday” blow job was a calculated risk on her part, a test she hadn’t wanted to name as such at the time. Jughead passed with flying colors, she thinks, and judging by his reaction, so had she.) 

Betty sticks her head out of the walk-in closet, where she’s been putting away her own shoes. “I don’t know,” she teases. “Can you?” 

This earns her two narrowed eyes and a sort of grumbled “ _May_ I play the birthday card one more time?”

“You already played it once to go to Pop’s, and you didn’t even finish your milkshake.” 

“I was distracted,” he protests, as she walks over to him. “You distracted me.” 

She smiles; she can’t help it. “What did I do?” 

“You were there.” One of his hands lands on each of her hips, and he takes a deep breath. “Betty,” he says, tugging her gently until she kneels in the chair, straddling his lap, “will you please just… let me?” 

Throat suddenly dry, Betty swallows once, then nods. 

In a surprisingly deft move, Jughead reaches around her and unzips her dress; she slides her arms from the straps and lets the bodice fall to her waist, then drapes her arms around his neck. This time, she does suck in her stomach a little bit—not because it’s a habit, but because Jughead’s already pressing kisses down her throat, and the combination of the soft pressure from his lips and his fingertips, which are now gently skimming her ribs, is enough to make her shiver. 

He pauses for a moment, looking up at her with an unasked question in his eyes. 

“Please,” she says, softly.

  
  


For the second time in two days, they make love with all the lights on. She’s starting to think she’ll never want it any other way. 

“How do you feel?” Jughead asks after. He’s propped up on one elbow, regarding her with something of a satisfied smirk as he traces her curves with the fingers of his other hand; she’s not sure whether she wants to kiss that smirk right off his face, or let him keep it. He’s definitely earned it. 

After a moment of thought, she says, simply, “Boneless.” 

The smirk gets a little bigger.

  
  


Saturday’s weather is crisp and dry, so they pack a picnic lunch and drive into the woods by Sweetwater River for a few hours of hiking. They get takeout for dinner, drive right back into the woods, and watch the sunset from the hood of her car. 

When they return to her house, she throws out the butternut squash and dandelion green ravioli.

  
  


On Sunday, it rains. Betty spends the morning getting as far ahead in her lesson planning for the week as she can, working at her upstairs desk while Jughead types away on the couch, now folded back up to its usual state. After lunch, she makes a fresh pot of coffee and bakes a pan of brownies and then joins him there, sitting on the opposite end with her feet in his lap and an old throw blanket over her legs. 

He reads the first chapter of his novel aloud to her. The coffee goes cold.

  
  


She comes home from school on Monday to find him moping in the living room. 

“I can’t extend my time off,” he says, as soon as she walks in the door. “I’ve got thirteen more days accrued, but they won’t let me tack them on right now.” 

“Okay,” Betty replies. “What does that mean?” 

Jughead twitches a couple of times. “It means I have to leave Saturday morning.” 

They fuck on the living room sofa, fast and messy, as though marking the space is going to somehow tie Jughead to it. She lays on top of him afterwards, ear pressed to his still-bare chest, and wonders how she’ll feel when she takes the cushions off to vacuum in a month and finds dark hairs in all the crevasses. 

“When will we see each other again?” she asks. Her body rises and falls with each breath he takes. 

Jughead is silent for a moment. His fingers press firmly into the base of her neck, almost—but not quite—at the spots that hold the most tension. 

“Not fucking soon enough,” he says.

  
  


Maybe this will be good, she tells herself on Tuesday. Tonight Jughead’s sleeping only in boxer shorts; he’s facing away from her in bed and letting out the very occasional snore while she lightly scratches his upper back. Maybe it will be good for them to have some distance, sort out their feelings a little. She’s only too aware— _painfully_ aware, really—that what they’re doing looks crazy from the outside. Most of Jughead’s life from of the twelve years they spent apart feels like a tangible absence to her, a gap whose edges she can sense, if not see, in her mind. But those years can be filled in from a distance. They can keep making sure they like each other, as adults, without getting distracted by sex. 

(In her heart of hearts, she knows perfectly well that whatever they have between them is about so much more than sex. She knows it’s more than nostalgia for their imperfect youths. She also knows that if she heard about any other two people doing what they’re doing, she would cringe, and suggest proceeding with much more caution than they have taken.) 

She falls asleep with her hand still on his back.

  
  


They spend Wednesday night with Archie and Brigitte and Fred. After dinner, they sit in the living room; Jughead casually slips an arm around her shoulder while they chat over coffee, and while Archie shoots both of them strange looks, he bites his tongue until they’re just about to leave and Jughead excuses himself to the restroom. 

In the hallway, Archie catches her arm. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” he tells her. 

“Archie…” 

“I just don’t want to see you get hurt. Either of you.” 

She nods, and sighs, and nods again. He means well; she knows that. Archie always means well. 

“If we hurt each other,” she says, slowly, “it’s okay. We’re adults. We know what we’re getting into.” 

“I just…” He pauses for a moment, furrowing his brow in that peculiarly Archie way. “I feel really stupid, you know? How come I never noticed you two _liked_ each other, back then?” 

“It’s okay, Archie.” She puts a friendly hand on his forearm. “We didn’t figure it out either.” 

He nods, but she can see he’s having a very hard time letting it go. 

She relays the conversation to Jughead once they’re in the car, and he snorts. 

“Archie never noticed I liked him,” she says, “so I’m not sure why he would think he should have noticed when I started liking _you_.” 

“Did you ever tell him? About your feelings, I mean. Before the essay.” 

“I did,” she admits. “The truth came out one summer when we were home from college.” 

“What made you tell him then?” 

She thinks about it for a moment. “I don’t know,” she says, truthfully. “It was one of those days that was just crazy hot, and I was in my room, and he stuck his head out his bedroom window and asked if I wanted to go to the river. So we went. We were sitting on a rock around sunset, dangling our feet into the water, and I suddenly had this crazy feeling come over me, like I was in the middle of a novel I was writing about my own life and this was some huge meaningful scene I had to write down. So I just asked if he ever knew.” 

Jughead remains silent, though she can feel his eyes on her. 

“He said he didn’t,” she concludes. 

“Did you believe him?” 

“Yeah, I—why?”

“He knew,” Jughead says. “Or he at least suspected.” 

“Oh.” Betty’s mind instantly reels, although the information is less surprising than it perhaps ought to be. The most uncomfortable prickles of discomfort, she decides, are coming from the knowledge that her two best friends had talked to each other about her. “You know that how?” 

“He told me he was afraid you felt differently about him than he did about you. He asked me for _advice_ , actually. Which is pretty hilarious on multiple levels, when you think about it.” 

She’s not sure she would call it hilarious now; she certainly wouldn’t have called it that then. “When was this? And what did you say?” 

“Right before he started dating Veronica. And I told him he should talk to you, obviously.” In her peripheral vision, she sees him turn his head to look out the passenger-side window. “He said he didn’t want to hurt your feelings.” 

They drive the rest of the way to her house in silence. After she’s turned the car off and pulled the key from the ignition, she turns to Jughead. 

“I would have preferred to know the truth.” 

Jughead takes this completely in stride. “I know,” he says. “I told him that too.” 

It’s not until much later, when they’re tucked into bed and she’s warm and comfortable in his arms, that the _sadness_ of it all hits Betty. She wishes he’d felt confident enough to tell her his truth then, even as she’s so profoundly grateful for everything he’s been able to tell her now. 

“Juggie,” she murmurs, into his skin, right where his heart beats warm and steady. 

“Yeah?” 

“Can we…?” She lets her hand slip down his stomach. 

“Again?” he says, although they haven’t yet today. “You know I’m never going to complain about that.” 

He tries to scoot out from under her, but Betty says, “No,” and swings her leg over him instead. 

She stays on top. She pins his shoulders to the mattress with her hands, slightly chipped pink nails leaving a faint pattern of crescents. She keeps her eyes open the whole time, and as he shudders and jerks underneath her, she bites her lip and thinks _mine, mine, mine_.

  
  


On Thursday morning, Betty’s mother calls. 

“I hope you don’t think I didn’t see you two at the Andrews’ house last night,” Alice Cooper says sharply, and Betty instantly regrets picking up the phone. “You can take Snake Plissken for dinner with _them_ , but you won’t make time for your own mother?” 

She locks eyes with Jughead over the kitchen table, knowing he’ll be able to hear every word. He gives her a half-smile and mouths _It’s fine_. 

Through mutually gritted teeth, they endure her mother’s famous pot roast. It comes with the usual gravy, as well as far too many pointed questions about Jughead’s life in Ohio, Jughead’s family, and what _exactly_ Jughead thinks he’s up to. 

At the end of the evening, Alice rises from the table, tells Betty she expects help clearing the table, and tells Jughead to remain seated. 

“Mom,” she starts. “I know what you’re going to say, and—”

Her mother lifts a single finger. “He’s grown into a very nice young man, Elizabeth,” she says. “But that hair of his is ridiculous. Have you told him to cut it?” 

Though she’s thrown for a loop, it’s not enough of a loop to deactivate her instinct to answer back. “I _like_ Jughead’s hair.” 

One hand resting on her hip, Alice taps the fingers of her other hand on the countertop, _click click click_. She regards Betty for a full ten seconds, and then spins on her heel, swooping up the inevitable peach pie before heading back to the kitchen with a crisp “Forsythe, I assume you saved room for dessert?”

  
  


“Pop’s is still usually packed on Friday nights,” she warns Jughead, before they leave the house. “Are you sure you want to go there?” 

“I’m not the one who gives a shit if local teenagers see us together. Also, you’re the one who brought it up six hours ago—”

“Have you really been thinking about dinner since lunch?”

“—also, have you met me? When in my life have I ever—” 

“You never have,” Betty sighs. “You have never once in your life turned down going to Pop’s.” 

Pop’s is, indeed, packed when they get there. But Pop smiles at them and nods towards a booth at the back corner. 

“All ready for you,” he says. “One vanilla shake and one black coffee, coming right up.” 

There’s a tented piece of paper on the tabletop, proclaiming _Reserved_ in black Sharpie. 

“Jug, you didn’t,” she groans, though she’s also laughing. “Pop doesn’t take reservations.” 

Jughead merely raises his eyebrows. “He does for you, apparently.” 

Halfway through their meal, he gives her a swift kick under the table. 

“Ow.” She bends down to rub her shin, although she isn’t really hurt. “What was—”

“Don’t look now,” Jughead says, “but also, definitely look now.” 

Betty twists in her seat, and gasps when her eyes land on two familiar figures engaged in what she can only describe as canoodling. “Oh, _no_ ,” she says, taking in the scene. “Sabrina, you can do so much better than Cameron.”

  
  


“So this is it,” Betty says. 

Jughead nods. “This is it,” he echoes. “The famous hole.” 

They’re standing in her driveway, next to his bike, and this is the last possible reason she can think of to delay his departure: an examination of the beanie that had once been such a fixture that the first time she’d seen him without it (junior year, when he’d gotten caught in an unexpected rainstorm on his way to an early _Blue and Gold_ meeting and subsequently hung it over a radiator to dry), she’d felt the same shock she might have gotten if she’d walked in on him completely naked.

She turns the beanie over in her hands. All these years later, the pins are still in place. “It’s not the worst hole. You know, my mom can knit. She might know how to fix it.” 

“I’m not leaving my hat with your mom,” he says. “Even if she did give you her reluctant approval, I’d get it back with devil horns embroidered on it, or something. Or she’d just burn it and mail me a pile of ashes.”

“Yeah, that might be true.” 

Reluctantly, Betty hands him the hat. Reluctantly, Jughead stuffs it back inside the bag that’s strapped to the back of his bike. 

They kiss, and kiss, and kiss. Then he straddles the motorcycle, and she leans forward, tipping her forehead so it rests on his. 

“Soon,” he says. “I promise.” 

She nods. “Soon.” 

She steps back, hugging her arms into her chest over her cozy blue bathrobe, and wonders if she can justify going back to bed instead of getting dressed. 

Jughead pulls on his helmet and revs his engine twice, and then—in almost the blink of an eye—he’s gone.

  
  


She finds herself back at Pop’s the very next evening, sitting in the same booth she’d been in just two Saturdays ago when the doorbell had tinkled and she had not turned to look, because how could she ever have expected something like _that_ was about to happen? 

Then, she’d been pushing a red pen around responses to her weekly reading quiz and thinking about whether having a piece published in such an important publication made her feel different. Now, she’s pushing ketchup around her plate with a handful of fries she doesn’t much feel like eating and thinking about what a difference two weeks can make. 

Part of the discomfort she felt at the beginning of his stay had to do with the unexpected manner of his arrival, and some had to do with her confusion over whether the attraction she felt was real, or just stirred up from the dust of what they’d shared as sixteen-year-olds. But some of it also came from the way he’d almost immediately started filling in the little holes in her life, the ones that have become harder and harder to ignore over the past year. 

The girl who’d once sobbed frustrated tears at her mother while proclaiming she did everything to be perfect to everyone, the girl who’d cried in front of her bedroom mirror because the boy next door couldn’t see her as anything but a friend—that girl still lives within Betty, sometimes buried deep, sometimes closer to the surface. Though she’s learned both when to say no and how forcefully to say it, that girl inside her has a second side, a permanently trailing shadow, that Betty rarely acknowledges even to herself. 

There are so many times Betty has done everything to be perfect for everyone, but no one has ever done everything to be perfect for _her_ , and that’s always hurt much more than she likes to admit. 

And “perfect” isn’t the right word, not really. She hates “perfect” for its sheer impossibility; even if she didn’t hate that word, it still wouldn’t be quite right. The point remains, though: Betty has, has always had, ample evidence that on the whole, other people matter more to her than she does to them. She knows she _matters_. She knows she matters _a lot_. But she never matters _the most_. 

From the moment he’d walked through the door at Pop’s, Jughead made her feel as though she _might_. She might matter the most. 

She tries explaining all this to Cheryl, who smiles kindly in a way that doesn’t reach her eyes, pats Betty’s hand, and says, “Cousin Betty, this is a gross overreaction to someone assembling a lasagna in your kitchen.” 

“You’re mad at me because I didn’t tell you right away, aren’t you?” It’s not really a question, and they both know it.

“Oh, indubitably.” Cheryl takes a long, slow slip through her milkshake straw, which Betty knows is a calculated pause for dramatic effect. “But you have to admit that being furious doesn’t automatically make me _wrong_.” 

Betty watches Pop Tate shake a basket of onion rings from the deep fryer to a plate. “It doesn’t automatically make you right, either,” she says. 

“True,” Cheryl concedes. “I am, however, very rarely wrong.” 

“You were wrong about people in Riverdale reading the _New York Times_.” 

“And I was wrong when I disparaged our dear siblings’ harvest. Your mother brought me some of the butternut squash and dandelion green ravioli. I prepared it with a brown butter and maple syrup sage sauce,” Cheryl says. “It was really quite delicious.”

  
  


Back at home, she strips the chipped pink polish from her nails, files them into their usual dull ovals, and applies base coat, two layers of pale matte pink, and topcoat. The topcoat is very nearly dry when her phone rings. 

She swipes to answer, then hits the speaker button. 

“Hey, you,” she says. “How far did you get?” 

“Pretty far. Almost to Erie.” He pauses. “I miss you.” 

Betty’s throat tightens. “Miss you too.”

  
  


  
  


(to be continued…)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always - a comment would be wonderful, when you have the time.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to heartunsettledsoul and village-skeptic for lending me their eyeballs.

Returning to his life feels inexplicably like opening up a book he’s read before and thought he knew well, only to discover that all those passages, the ones he could have sworn he remembered verbatim? 

He’s been misquoting them the whole time. 

The other side of his bed is colder than it used to be. 

His entire first day back at work is spent sorting through two weeks’ worth of emails. A solid tenth of them are intra-office debates about where to have lunch, which serve only to give him the uncomfortable sensation that no one except Toni noticed his absence. 

On his third day back, as he swoops south on I-75 en route to review a Cincinnati chili food truck, he could swear he senses arms hugging him from behind, a head pressed against his back, like a whole person’s worth of phantom severed limbs. The feeling is so morbid that he sends Betty a socially unacceptable number of pictures of himself and Cincinnati chili and then waits anxiously, shoveling the stuff in his mouth at warp speed, until she responds. 

_On spaghetti? With raw onions? Gross_.

  
  


“Most men are commitment-phobes,” Toni says, curling her fingers around the edges of her almond milk latte. “Trust you to deliberately go one hundred and eighty degrees in the other direction.” 

“What’s _that_ supposed to mean?” Jughead knows exactly what that’s supposed to mean. Trust Toni, though, to make sweeping generalizations regarding situations about which she knows very little. 

“It means no sane person reads an exercise in creative nonfiction, takes off across the country to find the author, and comes back two weeks later declaring himself in love with her.” 

Jughead glares at her over his own coffee (drip, bitter, and black—like his soul, as the all-too-overplayed joke goes). They glare at each other a lot, usually with no small degree of affection; he’s not sure how much affection he feels for her right now. For one, he hates this brunch restaurant, which is too popular, too overpriced, and too healthy for his tastes; for another, Toni refuses to acknowledge any of his feelings on said restaurant, and insists on coming here every single time they go out; for a third, she seems bound and determined to insult his girlfriend, whom she’s never met. 

Already, today, the word _basic_ has been casually tossed out twice. And while Jughead’s never been sure of the precise meaning of that insult, he understands it well enough that the irony of Betty getting dismissed as _basic_ by someone who repeatedly orders avocado toast at a hipster brunch spot, one whose tables are decorated with tiny succulents potted in mason jars, is not lost on him. 

“That’s not what happened.” 

“Okay, fine.” She rolls her eyes. “You haven’t technically declared yourself to be in love.” 

“Thank you,” he grumbles. 

Toni waits a beat, and then adds, as a challenge, “You are, though.” 

“Yeah,” he says, pointedly _not_ waiting a beat before answering. “I am.” 

This time, Toni’s silent for much longer. They study each other good and hard, two colleagues who became friends and then tried and failed to become more. He thinks he knows what Toni’s thinking, thinks there’s a rant running through her mind that starts with a critique of his tendency to romanticize what she would call _shit better left in the past_ , continues into some choice comments about how she can’t even get him to meet any of her friends for coffee, and probably ends with a mostly-joking and highly original _if she’s so great, what’s she doing with you?_

Instead, she sighs and says, “I don’t get you sometimes, Jones.”

“What’s to get?” he retorts. “This just _is_.”

  
  


Even though Jughead had known almost at once that he _would_ fall in love with Betty, he hasn’t been able to pinpoint the exact moment he’d crossed that line. Between when he kissed the scars on her palms and when he kissed her goodbye, it had simply happened. He rode all the way back to Toledo with the knowledge that he loves her washing over him, like it was a tidal wave and he an endlessly thirsty sponge, determined to absorb all he could hold. 

He hasn’t told this to Betty yet, of course. Convinced though he is that their decision to date long-distance until they can work out alternate arrangements is not just practical, but the only possible course of action, he’s sane enough to have realized that declaring his love before he left would have been a huge red flag, and he’s romantic enough to not want to do it over the phone or on FaceTime. No, he’ll tell Betty Cooper he loves her in person. 

He’ll tell her in five more weeks. 

That’s how long until they can see each other again. Five more weeks. Thanksgiving. It’ll be six weeks apart, in total, a length of time that seems like a heartbeat and an eternity all at once. 

“You’re sure you want to come to Toledo?” he asks her, for the third time at least. “I don’t mind making the drive again.” 

“Of course I want to come.” She’s a little blurry on his computer screen, a little pixelated, but the pointed raise of her eyebrows comes through loud and clear. “You saw my life. I want to see yours.” 

“And I want you to see it. But…” 

The truth is, he doesn’t really know what the _but_ is. 

His apartment, a smallish one-bedroom he’s occupied since he graduated from college, isn’t anything fancy. All his furniture is either secondhand or from Target; he never bothered to paint any of the walls, and he doesn’t own any potted plants. But it’s clean, if a bit overstuffed with books and movie posters, and it feels more like home than anywhere else he’s ever lived. 

Strained though his familial relationships often are, he made a conscious decision a long time ago not to be embarrassed or ashamed about his less-than-ideal upbringing. He may not get along very well with his mother, may have spent far too long resenting her for ripping him out of the life he’d known, but as an adult, he’s fucking _proud_ of her for making those decisions. All of this is, of course, irrelevant; technically speaking, Betty’s known his family since she was about four. 

And he _does_ want Betty to see the life he’s built for himself. It’s not perfect by any means. But considering what it could have been, what it almost was, he thinks it’s turned out pretty well. 

Toledo just isn’t much of a tourist destination. Maybe that’s it. Or maybe it’s that the food at his mother’s house is bound to be four or five steps down from what he imagines an Alice Cooper Thanksgiving spread must be. 

“ _Jug_ ,” Betty says, kindly but firmly. “It’s settled. I already bought my ticket.” 

After they say goodnight, he goes back to his novel—not the third one, the one that he thinks isn’t completely terrible, but the very first one he ever tried to write. The one that he now recognizes isn’t a hundred thousand terrible words about a doomed romantic relationship at all, but rather, ten thousand pretty decent words about a father and son who don’t quite fit together. 

He makes a fresh pot of coffee and flexes his fingers, prepared to start trimming the fat.

  
  


Towards the end of October, weeks after the fact, the Jones family (such as it is) finally manages to get together at his mother’s for the half-hearted birthday dinner Jughead agrees to most years. After an entire meal, a rendition of “Happy Birthday,” and half a serving of cake without anyone mentioning the reason he wasn’t here for the birthday weekend itself, he decides he’s finally had enough of pretending whatever it is they’re pretending. 

He clears his throat and announces, cooly, “Betty’s coming for Thanksgiving this year.” 

It’s J.B. who reacts most visibly to this new news, of course. “Damn,” she says, banging the end of her fork on the table. 

“Forsythia,” warns their mother, who remains infuriatingly impassive otherwise. Jughead supposes that any overt displays of emotion she might have had were bestowed upon J.B. when she’d broken the news. 

“I wasn’t being critical. I was just saying ‘damn.’” 

“You’re sending crumbs all over the table.” 

“So I’ll clean them up—”

“You say that,” Gladys sighs, “but you never do.” 

As they continue to bicker, Jughead wonders (not for the first time) whether his mother and sister would be happier if J.B. finally got her act together enough to permanently move out of their mom’s place. A few minutes go by before he clears his throat a second time. 

“Does anyone have _objections_?” 

In unison, his mother and sister turn their heads towards him. J.B. takes the additional step of then pushing back from the kitchen table and exiting in the way she always does—dramatically, as though pursued by a bear. 

Gladys watches her go, then turns back, surveying Jughead over her mug of black coffee. 

“I read the essay Betty wrote,” she says. “It was lovely.” 

Unsure of where she’s going with this, and unsure as to how he feels about his mother reading about a crush someone had on him at the age of sixteen, Jughead crams another large forkful of chocolate cake into his mouth. 

“I remember her, a little,” Gladys continues, and with a slight shock, Jughead realizes _she_ doesn’t have any idea where she’s going with this, either. “She was always such a nice girl, despite her mother.” 

The words _You knew Alice?_ form on the tip of Jughead’s tongue, but he shoves them down with more cake. It’s unlike his mother to discuss the past without prompting, and he wants to hear what she has to say. 

“I didn’t realize you had feelings for her then.” 

“No one ever said—” he starts, but his mother levels a glance at him. 

“You wouldn’t have driven back to Riverdale on a whim if you hadn’t,” she says. 

He nods. “Touché.” 

Gladys stands up, collects the carafe from the coffee maker, and refills both their mugs. She replaces the carafe. She wipes J.B.’s crumbs from the old vinyl tablecloth. 

“It will be very nice to have Betty here,” she says, at long last. 

Jughead raises an eyebrow over the remains of his cake. “You’re sure? You don’t sound sure.” 

To his immense surprise, his mother sits back down at the table with tears collecting at the corners of her eyes. “Sometimes I think,” she says, slowly, “that _you_ think that I don’t want you to be happy.” 

He’s never thought that, not exactly. “Mom—” 

She holds up a hand to quiet him. “Or that you think I don’t care what’s going on in your life.”

“Mom,” he starts again, this time falling silent when she shakes her head. 

“I know we’ve never been close, and I know a lot of that has to do with… circumstances when you were younger. But just so _you_ know, it does hurt that I have to find out this kind of thing about your life from your sister.” 

“Mom.” This third time, the word comes out with shortened breath; it’s started to feel a lot like she’s pummeling him right in the gut. But this is who the former Gladys Jones, the once and present Gladys Zielinski is: on the rare occasions she strikes, she aims not to wound, but to kill. He braces himself for whatever’s coming next.

“I do want you to be happy,” she says, and he feels suddenly unmoored at the realization that she isn’t striking at all. “I don’t think I’ve told you that enough. I guess I always assumed it went without saying.” 

He nods, swallowing thickly. “I always assumed that too.” 

“And I wish your father and I had been able to give you and your sister better examples of what love was supposed to look like.” She taps her fingers on the tabletop, an unsteady staccato. “I’ve always worried you would be afraid to let yourself have that.” 

“I’m not,” Jughead vows, blinking back a sudden and unexpected tear of his own. “I swear I’m not.” 

She sends him home with half the remaining chocolate cake, a big hug, and the unsettling sensation that his mother either understands him completely or (and this seems more likely) not at all.

  
  


He and Betty talk every day, either by video chat or good old-fashioned phone call. Sometimes the calls last only a few minutes; sometimes they last hours. Jughead’s never much liked the sound of his own voice, but Betty always seems happy to hear it, even on the days she doesn’t seem very happy at all. 

“You okay?” he asks one evening, when she’s been quieter than usual. 

She sighs and reaches up to pull out the elastic securing her ponytail. “Yeah. I’m just… it’s been one of those days, you know?” 

The next day is another one of those days, and the next, and the next—but then her mood seems to lift the day after that. 

“You seem like you’re feeling better,” he ventures. 

Betty’s brow furrows, ever so slightly. “You could tell, huh?” 

“Well… yeah.” He clears his throat slightly. “Betts, if something wasn’t _okay_ , you would tell me, right?” 

“Of course. It’s not—I go through these little cycles sometimes. They usually don’t last very long, and I know that, so I just…push through as much as I can and wait the rest out, I guess?” 

Something in the tone of her voice, in the almost-imperceptible slump of her shoulders, tells him she doesn’t feel like talking about it any more. 

He wants to kiss her palms again. 

“Okay.” He’s unsure of what else he can offer from the other side of a computer screen. “Okay.” 

“Anyway, I started a new project, to have something to do,” she says. “Having something to work on usually helps.” 

“What’s the project?” 

Betty’s lips part slightly. She hesitates. 

“I don’t think I’m ready to tell you yet. Soon, though. I promise.” 

She gives him a little smile, just enough for his insides to turn completely to mush. 

“Okay,” he says again. “Well, color me intrigued.”

  
  


He starts going further and further afield on weekend days, packing his bike up with supplies for longer and longer trips: south, following Old U.S. 24 down the Maumee River; north, an hour up to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he finds an appropriately collegiate coffee shop near the U of M campus and plunks himself down for an afternoon of furious typing; east, all the way to the Marblehead Peninsula. 

He stands on the shores of Lake Erie, huddled against the cold in his leather jacket, and lets the vast expanse of water overwhelm his senses.

  
  


On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Jughead finds himself doing something he thought he never would: driving the forty-five minutes to the Detroit airport after his half-day of work. Or, to be more accurate, he’s sitting in the passenger seat, leg bouncing against the door, while J.B. drives. 

“Can you please just sit still?” she groans, somewhere around minute twenty-two. “Or put those flowers in the backseat, or something. Every time your knee hits that cellophane, it makes a godawful noise.” 

For the first time in a while, Jughead wishes he owned a car. 

He puts the flowers in the backseat. 

“Of all the people in the world,” J.B. continues, after a few moments of silence, “I can’t believe Betty Cooper is the one who turned you into…” 

Her words feel like a challenge of sorts, and he instinctively bristles. “Into what?” 

J.B. waves her right hand vaguely in his direction. “ This. A hopeless romantic.” 

“You always liked Betty,” he points out. He thinks he might always have been a hopeless romantic at heart, but J.B. doesn’t need to know that. 

“I was _ten_. She had magic markers in every color, and she let me use whichever ones I wanted.” 

Weirdly enough, Jughead also remembers being ten years old and impressed by both the size of Betty Cooper’s magic marker collection and the easy generosity with which she shared it. 

They ride the rest of the way in silence, save for the crinkle of cellophane from the backseat every time the car hits a bump in the pavement.

  
  


Traffic immediately surrounding the airport is a nightmare, and the short-term parking lot is an even bigger nightmare, and so Betty’s already off the plane and on her way to baggage claim by the time Jughead bursts through the airport doors with his bouquet in hand. 

(For reasons she didn’t bother explaining, J.B. has elected to wait in the car. He’s more than fine with that.) 

He finds the right baggage carousel, then waits anxiously, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, unable to hear the squeaking of tile under his shoes over the general din of the busiest travel day of the year. 

By all rights, this moment of reunion ought to feel like something out of a movie. It doesn’t, though. No music swells; his internal rhythms don’t increase past what they were in the car. Betty doesn’t emerge from the crowds like Aphrodite on a seashell. They simply find each other. 

“Hi,” she says, tired but beautiful as she smiles at him. She’s wearing a backpack and carrying another bag, one that looks suspiciously like… 

“Hi yourself,” he replies. The airport chaos is such that they can’t even kiss properly right away, but he can’t resist dropping his lips to the top of her head, even if they _are_ blocking foot traffic. “These are for you,” he adds, holding out the flowers as they walk back towards the baggage claim. 

Betty has to hand him her bag before she can take them, and as Jughead weighs what’s now in his arms, he realizes he’s _right_. 

“They’re beautiful,” she says, just as he raises an eyebrow at her. 

“You bought a motorcycle helmet?” 

Betty grins. “Surprise.” 

They stand together at the baggage carousel to wait for her suitcase, Betty tucked under his arm, and Jughead’s heart pumps harder than it ever has on the motorcycle.

  
  


“Well,” he says, after he’s let them both into his apartment, “this is it.” He watches Betty take in the combination living and dining area, the little galley kitchen, and the door that leads to his bedroom. 

She nods. “It’s nice.” 

“It’s okay.” 

“It looks like you,” she says, whatever that means, and then, “Bathroom?” 

He points her through to the bedroom, and she drags her rolling bag along with her. Wanting to give her privacy, he starts unloading the dishwasher he’d run earlier, looking up from his task only when he hears her call his name.

“Yeah?” he calls back. 

“Come here.” 

He’s already grinning before he reaches the bedroom, where he discovers Betty under his covers, her sweater and jeans already removed and folded neatly atop her suitcase. 

In this moment, he curses his tendency to always wear multiple layers of clothing. 

“Hurry,” she says, patting his usual side of the bed; he slides in as soon as he’s down to his boxers. Betty pulls him close against her at once, and he has to fight not to moan outright when the skin of her torso meets his. 

“God, you’re warm.” A pale blue cotton bra still covers her breasts; it has a front closure, which he simply can’t wait to unhook and watch fall open. His hands skim her bare shoulders, her bare arms, her bare waist, before he finishes removing the bra. “Also hot.” 

Betty chuckles briefly, then settles herself on her back, head resting on his favorite pillow. “I missed you, Jug.” 

“I missed you too.” 

She reaches up, arms open and inviting. 

“Ravish me,” she says, and so he does.

  
  


He’d be happy to stay in bed with her for the rest of the night, keeping their skin adhered pleasantly together until morning, aside from two issues: one, he’s hungry, and two, Betty wants to go for a walk. 

“That’s not always the best idea,” he warns her; his neighborhood is _pretty_ safe, but Toledo’s crime rate is historically not great, and things always seem to get worse around holidays. Instinct tells him nothing will happen, not with the two of them together, but what if, _what if_...

“Really?” Betty wrinkles her nose. “This looked like a nice area when we drove in.” 

“It’s after nine now, though.” 

“You just want to keep me in bed, don’t you?” she says, laughing when his face clearly gives that away. “Jug, I lived on my own in New York for a while, you know. I’m sure a relatively nice area of Toledo can’t be worse than taking the subway in the middle of the night.” 

“Probably not,” he admits, though he’s never been to New York and has no real reference for what the subway is like in the middle of the night. 

They get dressed, bundling themselves against the chilly November air. Betty proposes getting something to eat— “that drive-thru on the way back from the airport was hours ago, Jug, I’m sure you’re hungry again by now”—but of course nothing is open at this time of night on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. They simply walk a big loop around several blocks, arms linked. The wind whips raw against his knuckles; it’s a small price to pay for the privilege of keeping her hand warm in his. They pass apartment buildings, closed convenience stores and dry cleaners and pawn shops, small and well-worn houses with the lights on. The world is quiet and content. 

Through undrawn living room curtains, they can see one family already decorating an artificial Christmas tree positioned in their picture window. Betty stops for a moment, watching them; Jughead glances from the window to Betty’s face and back again. He can’t help but imagine Betty putting up a tree in her own living room when she returns to Riverdale—it will be a real tree, though, he’s sure—and he can’t help but insert himself into the scene, too, feels a stretch in his bicep as his imaginary self reaches to put a star on the top of the tree. 

Someone inside plugs the tree lights in. They’re standing too far away for the multicolored bulbs to shine light on them, but he knows what Betty’s face looks like illuminated in soft reds and blues and pinks, knows how the neon of Pop’s makes her hair shine, and that’s what he sees now, a soft-toned holiday rainbow playing across her skin. 

“I love you,” he says, without thinking. 

Betty starts slightly, gripping his hand tighter, and turns to him with a strange sort of wonder in her eyes. 

“I love you too.” She sounds surprised, and her voice wavers a bit as she responds, but he can’t blame her; _he_ wasn’t expecting himself to say that, right then and there. “I love you too.”

  
  


It’s misting slightly on Thanksgiving morning, and so J.B. drives by around eleven to pick them up—which was the plan anyway, since Jughead didn’t know Betty had decided to buy herself a motorcycle helmet. 

“Brace yourselves,” J.B. says dryly as they climb into the car, him in the passenger side and Betty in the back. “Mom’s making an effort this year. I think she wants to impress you, Betty.” 

“What’s that mean?” Jughead asks, suddenly nervous. “Is she actually _cooking_?” 

“Well, the pumpkin pie is still store-bought. But did you know we actually owned a potato peeler? No boxed flakes this year.” 

“Wow,” Jughead says, and then “What?” at Betty’s half-amused, half-puzzled expression. 

“Nothing. I just…” 

“Thought Thanksgiving would be a bigger deal for us because it’s a food-based holiday and you’ve seen Jughead eat?” J.B. says, laughing when Betty nods. “Nah. That’s just him. Mom and I eat like normal humans. It’s just, none of us can cook.” 

“Jughead can cook,” Betty says, sounding confused. 

“Really?” J.B. takes her eyes off the road to give him a good quizzical stare. “Since when?”

  
  


The day is fine. Better than fine, in fact. The food even turns out pretty well, thanks to Betty’s gentle insistence that she and Jughead ought to help out in the kitchen. It’s the first year he can remember the turkey being neither over nor underdone, and unlike J.B., he’s never minded a store-bought pumpkin pie anyway. 

Even before they eat, though, he feels like he might just be glowing. 

He knows Betty has always been ambivalent about the good-girl manners and image that Alice drilled into her—but it’s not _just_ those qualities that make her such a wonderful guest, or such a wonderful girlfriend. It’s _her_ , all of her, her intelligence and her kindness and the double-edged sword that is her compulsion to make everything better, which sometimes cuts just right. It’s how easily she gives the impression that there’s nowhere she would rather be than here, in this uninspiring city, eating his mother’s uninspiring cooking. 

(Then again, she might not be having to try very hard. She’s been showing him the texts she’s receiving from Cheryl, who’s spending Thanksgiving at the cult with Alice, Polly, and Jason, and Toledo certainly seems preferable to him.) 

“Jug,” J.B. says, when she’s dropping them off at the end of the day, “She’s out of your league.” 

Even though Betty is out of the car already and doesn't hear, Jughead’s jaw instantly clenches; he doesn’t want _this_ , doesn’t want to see that lopsided grin on his sister’s face, the one that J.B. probably doesn’t even realize she inherited from their father. He doesn’t want to feel sixteen today. He wants to continue feeling like an adult in a goddamned serious relationship with a woman he loves. 

“Goddamnit, J.B.,” he sighs, although he doesn’t want to fight with his little sister, either. “Couldn’t we have gotten through one day without—”

“What?” she counters. “That’s a compliment. I like Betty, even when she doesn’t have magic markers.” 

“Do you think you could have said that without insulting _me_?” 

“It was a joke, Jughead.” She rolls her eyes. “Sorry. Didn’t realize your skin had gotten so thin.” 

Jughead shuts the car door hard. A little too hard, judging by the way Betty’s eyebrows lift as he steps onto the sidewalk with their bag of leftovers. 

“Everything okay?” 

“Yeah, it’s fine.” 

Betty loops her arm through his, and they start walking towards the front door of the building. “You look upset.” 

“It’s nothing. J.B. just had to get a crack in.” 

“What kind of crack?” 

“She thinks you’re too good for me,” he says, shrugging a little. 

Betty’s brow furrows. With her free hand, she reaches up to brush the permanently unruly lock of hair from his forehead, a gesture so tender he almost tears up. Then she grins at him. 

“Bullshit,” she says, cheerfully. “That’s complete bullshit, and we both know it.”

  
  


Black Friday dawns cold, but sunny. Betty takes her motorcycle helmet (silver, with a light blue racing stripe) out of its carrying case and lifts it up with a hopeful expression. 

“That’s what you want to do today?” 

“I didn’t buy it and drag it out here not to use it, Jug.” 

He grins. “Fair enough.” 

He doesn’t have a second leather jacket for her, but he bundles her up in his most rugged sherpa jacket, and off they go. 

Figuring Betty might not want to last very long on her first ever motorcycle ride, he heads east and crosses over the river. It’s about half an hour to the state park, and they’ll pass both the oil refinery and Tony Packo’s on the way; Betty might as well see the best and worst Toledo has to offer all at once. 

She wraps her arms around his waist and presses her head against his back, and all seems right with the world.

  
  


Saturday delivers gray skies and the dreaded, ill-defined “wintry mix,” which Jughead can’t say he minds. The weather is a good excuse to stay holed up in his apartment with Betty, who employs a very unfair strategy of plying him with morning sex and then homemade pancakes until he agrees to let her read what he’s been writing since he left Riverdale. 

(If Betty’s teacher outfits had made him weak at the knees, then the sight of her making breakfast in leggings and one of his flannel shirts was almost enough to make him think he’d never walk again. Now, although she’s reading from a computer screen, she has a pen tucked behind her ear, and he’s not even sure he has feeling in his lower extremity. 

Well. He has feeling in _one_ lower extremity for sure.

It’s such a dumb, cliché turn-on, _and yet_...) 

“It’s still too autobiographical, I think.” 

“I mean, I can tell it’s loosely based on you and your dad,” Betty says, after a brief and thoughtful chew on her lower lip. “But I know you. Most readers won’t. I think it feels pretty universal. This is the one you said was terrible, right?”

“It _was_ terrible. I’ve been working on making it less terrible.” 

(At the expense of the third, not-inherently-terrible book, he reminds himself. He needs to get back to work on that, too.)

She closes the laptop screen, sets the computer on the coffee table, and looks up. “I like where it’s going, Jug.” 

“Do you really? Or are you just saying that to spare my feelings?” 

“I do,” she says, a little more insistently. “You know I’d never say something just to spare your feelings.” 

He does know that. He knows it, and he loves that about her. 

“When do I get to read the thing you’re writing, Betty?” 

Her eyes narrow slightly. “I never told you I was writing anything.” 

“That project,” he says. “You said you’d started a new project.” 

“How do you know I’m not rebuilding an old car?” She sighs and removes the pen from behind her ear, twiddling it between her fingers for a moment before she puts it next to the laptop. “Okay, fine. I am writing something. And I think it’s pretty good. But I’m still not far enough along on it.” 

She stands up and stretches, cat-like, and takes a lap around the living room, pausing briefly to look out the window. Then she returns to the couch, this time curling herself under his arm. 

“When I think it’s ready,” she says, tracing her fingers idly over his chest, “you’ll be the first to read it. I promise.” 

The gentle kiss he plants on the top of her head soon turns into more.

  
  


J.B. declines to drive back to Detroit on Sunday. Whether that’s out of apathy, annoyance, or respect for their privacy, Jughead neither knows nor cares to ask. He simply borrows his mom’s car and feels his heart rise higher and higher in his throat with each bump of the tires on uneven pavement. 

“Christmas?” Betty says, tugging him close for one last kiss before airport security hurries him out of the drop-off lane. 

“Christmas,” he echoes, the word thick and dry on his tongue. 

She takes half a step back and studies his face like she’s trying to memorize it. “I love you.” 

Jughead’s had _her_ face memorized since he was fifteen. There are some changes, of course—her cheekbones less youthfully rounded, her forehead less prone to breakouts—but he could always have described every feature from memory without getting a thing wrong. But now his knowledge of her is tactile, too; now he knows the smoothness of her lips on his, the warmth of her breath, the soft flutter of her eyelashes against his cheek. 

“I love you, Betty Cooper,” he tells her.

  
  


With a whoosh and a rustle, this week’s edition of the paper whacks into Jughead’s shoulder. He looks up from his desk, already knowing what’s to come. 

“Can’t believe you didn’t introduce me to your girl,” Toni says, lifting her eyebrows at him. 

“You weren’t even in town,” Jughead points out; he knows Toni went to Dayton, to her grandfather’s. 

“You knew I was coming back Friday night. There was plenty of time to grab a drink or whatever. You can’t have been 'busy' the whole time.” 

“Well,” he says, rolling his eyes at Toni’s air quotes, “next time.” 

“And when is next time going to be, Jughead?” 

In his work inbox sits an email from HR, approving his time off for a few days on either side of Christmas and New Year’s; in his personal inbox sits a round-trip flight itinerary, Detroit to Albany (seats to be assigned at check-in). He has no idea when Betty might come to Toledo again. 

“I’ll let you know,” he says, with a shrug.

  
  


“It’s the weather,” Betty says. “And the end-of-semester stress, and—it just _is_. Don’t worry about me.” 

“I’m not worried, I just…” He lets out a breath. “Wish I could be there, I guess.” 

Betty nods. “I do too, of course, but—I mean, this is my brain chemistry, Jug. No amount of cuddling is going to magically make everything better.” 

“I know that,” he tells her. “But would it help a little bit?” 

“It would. Of course it would.” She cracks the tiniest of smiles. “Do _not_ jump on your motorcycle and drive seven hundred miles to Riverdale, Jughead Jones.” 

“I won’t,” he promises. 

He can’t. He has a godawful interview lined up tomorrow for the godawful feature he’s been assigned—behind the scenes with the organizers of next summer’s four-day-long international yodeling competition, a thing Jughead only wishes he was creative enough to make up. Truth, he supposes, is stranger than fiction, and strangest of all is the fact that he’s having to hype this event a full six months before it happens. If anyone yodels at him tomorrow, he might just quit on the spot. 

(He almost hopes someone yodels at him.) 

“It’s only two more weeks.” Betty emphasizes the _only_ as though she’s trying to convince herself of the fact. “We can handle two more weeks.” 

“We handled six,” he says. 

“Yeah. We did.” 

He watches her shoulders rise and fall, watches her tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, watches her eyes flick to the side of the screen before she picks up the mug of chamomile tea she’d set down there earlier. He watches her take a sip of tea, and another deep breath; he watches her put the mug down, carefully, adjusting it just so on its worn cork coaster. 

“It seems longer this time,” she says, and Jughead can only agree.

The other side of his bed is cold again.

  
  


  
  


(to be continued...)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always - thank you for reading, and when you have a moment, I would love to know your thoughts.


	9. Chapter 9

Polly leans over her mug of herbal tea, eyes wide, as she stirs her usual enormous dollop of honey into the hot liquid. “Betty,” she says, earnest as always, “love solves _everything_.” 

“I don’t think—” 

“Look at Jason and me.” Polly smiles blankly across the yurt at her husband, who smiles blankly back at her. “When we got married, we had _nothing_ but love. And all our dreams came true.” 

_Your dreams were weird_ , Betty thinks. But she holds her tongue. She takes a sip of tea instead, and scalds the roof of her mouth. Doubly irritated, she sets the thick clay mug on the slab of wood that Polly calls a table and folds her arms across her chest. She isn’t cold—the yurt is always much warmer than she expects it to be—but the air inside is rife with patchouli and weeks without showering, and the more of her own fabric softener she can convince to waft up to her face, the better. 

Also, she’s annoyed with her sister. 

“If this relationship isn’t working as well as you hoped,” Polly continues, “you just have to love Jughead harder.” 

To Betty’s left, Cheryl lets out a slight _huff_ and rises to her feet, steady in her stilettos despite the yurt’s uneven floor. “We’d better get back on the road before it starts snowing again,” she says. “Thanks for the tea and sympathy, Pollikins. Jay-Jay, Junie, Daggie—we’ll see you in two weeks for Christmas, okay?” 

Everyone says their goodbyes, and then Betty and Cheryl climb into the cherry red Tesla that Cheryl insists on driving up every time they visit together, as though ostentatious display of the most modern possible conveniences will one day trigger Jason and Polly to make a permanent return to civilization. 

(Betty has no objections to always coming in the Tesla. She never has to drive, and she doesn’t have to chip in for gas.) 

They drive in silence until snow starts to fall. 

“Damn it,” says Cheryl. She turns on the radio and surfs through stations until she lands on a weather report. 

The practiced, calming drone of the radio announcer sends Betty into a mild stupor, and she gives into it, closing her eyes and resting her head against the slippery leather seats. In and out she drifts, the inside of her head thick and sticky, until they’re almost all the way back to Riverdale and Cheryl hits a particularly bumpy pothole. 

When she stirs, Cheryl glances over at her. “What did Dagwood put in your tea blend today, Cousin Betty?” 

“Chamomile, I think,” Betty says, through a yawn. “He knows better than to slip anything stronger in there. I’m just tired.” 

“Not sleeping well?” 

Betty shrugs. The Tesla passes by Pop’s, busy even in the beginnings of a snowstorm. 

“You should be aware by now, my dear cousin, that love doesn’t solve _anything_. Love merely exacerbates your existing problems by making you more emotional about them.” 

But Cheryl—to Betty’s knowledge, anyway—has never been in love. Cheryl, Betty’s always suspected, doesn’t trust enough to fall. Whether it’s herself or the rest of the world that Cheryl doesn’t trust, Betty isn’t sure. 

Betty trusts herself, though. And she trusts Jughead. And nothing needs to be _solved_. She’s in love with a great guy who loves her back, and this, surely, is the opposite of a problem.

  
  


Once she’s home, she surveys the contents of her fridge, thinks _I should go to the grocery store_ , and immediately calls to order a pizza for herself instead. Thirty minutes later, the doorbell rings, and she answers, cold from the entryway’s tile floor seeping through her socks. 

On her front stoop stands Cameron, greasy hair hanging limply around his ears, his skin green and pink in the Christmas lights strung around the outside of her house. (Alice Cooper has tasteful white Christmas lights. Betty Cooper, still determined to rebel in the smallest ways imaginable, has fun colorful ones.) The snowfall has picked up quite a bit since this afternoon, and Betty fights back an urge to ask Cameron why he isn’t wearing a hat. 

“Hi, Ms. Cooper.” He holds out the pizza box to her and reads from his printed slip. “One veggie supreme, prepaid, and…” He looks back in his lined carrier case. “I guess that’s it.” 

“That’s it,” she confirms, taking the pizza. She sign the slip he hands over with it and hands it back. 

Cameron’s hand drops to his side. “Okay.” 

He doesn’t seem inclined to go back to his car, and—trying not to sigh at either the situation or the warm air pouring out of her house—Betty finally gives in. “Is something wrong, Cameron?” 

“No,” he says, a little too quickly, his expression so forlorn she’s reminded of nothing so much as the time Josie McCoy told Archie he couldn’t join the Pussycats. “Enjoy your pizza, Ms. Cooper.”

  
  


Sitting at her kitchen table with two slices on a plate, Betty opens up her laptop. A rough draft of her current chapter stares back at her, cursor blinking blithely.

She takes a bite of pizza, types a sentence while she chews, and then sits back and critically assesses her work. 

Betty erases the new sentence, takes another bite of pizza, and erases the sentence preceding that one. 

At the conclusion of her meal, she checks the word count and finds she’s added a grand total of six words.

  
  


On Monday, she confirms her suspicions that Cameron and Sabrina broke up. And even though she knows she isn’t supposed to take sides, or be invested in her students’ relationships…

Even though she knows that, when Sabrina shows up for the _Blue and Gold_ meeting in what seem like perfectly cheerful spirits, she can’t help but think, _Good_.

  
  


It’s snowing (again? still? she’s not really sure) three days before Christmas, and she takes extra caution en route to the Albany airport. Jughead emerges from behind the security gates looking vaguely nauseated, but he doesn’t hesitate to pull her aside for a good, thorough kiss hello. 

She can sense, but not exactly taste, a hint of ginger ale. “Rough flight?” 

“There was some turbulence,” he says. “That’s… putting it mildly.” 

He’s wearing his old motorcycle jacket over a thick forest-green sweater, and Betty stays exactly where she is for a moment: in his arms, against his chest, lightly pressing her palms into the different textures of wool and metal zipper and leather. She takes a deep breath in, and Jughead holds her a little closer. 

“What do you want to do for food?” she asks. “I have some stuff at home I could make, but between the snow and the traffic, it might take three hours to get back to Riverdale, so I wasn’t really planning on cooking; I figured you’d be hungry before then. But if you’re not feeling great from the plane—” 

Jughead cuts her off with a soft kiss to the forehead. “Nah. I’ll feel better if I eat.”

  
  


They stop at a Chinese restaurant outside Albany, taking their time with dumplings and egg drop soup and fried rice before hitting the road again. It’s after nine o’clock by the time they finally pull into her driveway. 

“Looks nice,” Jughead says, taking in her modest decorations: the red and green lights lining her windows and rain gutters, the candy cane ribbon winding its way around her mailbox post, the wreath on her front door. 

She didn’t plug the tree in before she left, but she does that as soon as they get inside. Then she steps back to admire her own handiwork, letting her mind wander while Jughead takes his bag upstairs and uses the restroom. 

Christmas was her favorite time of year when she was a child; her parents’ obsession with keeping up the perfect Cooper façade translated well to making the season seem extra-special. Their house always looked magical, like a Restoration Hardware catalog come to life. The kitchen always smelled like cookies, thanks not to holiday baking but to plug-in fragrance diffusers. Santa never brought her _exactly_ what was on her wish list, but he was always generous. 

Then she’d started growing up, and realized Christmas felt better at Archie’s house. The Andrews always had a real tree, as opposed to the Coopers’ all-too-perfect fake one, and Archie’s parents hung all the ornaments he made at school on it, whereas her homemade ornaments were relegated to a small display in the guest bedroom, where no one ever went. Archie’s house only smelled like cookies when there actually were cookies in the oven. No one was trying to impress anyone. Even after Archie’s parents split up, Mary still came to Riverdale for Christmas every other year, and Fred and Archie went to Chicago for the years in between. 

Betty’s mother still uses the plug-in fragrance diffusers, but Betty no longer likes the smell of them. 

And Jughead’s family… she’s not sure how much they ever celebrated any holidays at all. She knows there was never much money for presents, but Jughead usually came back to school in January with at least a new shirt or pair of shoes. 

He’s said he doesn’t have any expectations for this particular Christmas, that he just wants to spend it with her, and she believes him. After all, that’s precisely what _she_ wants for this particular Christmas, too. 

She hears soft footsteps on her old wooden floor, and then Jughead’s arms wrap around her from behind. He tucks his chin onto her shoulder and kisses her on the cheek. His lips are soft, but the gesture is firm, decisive, confident. 

Betty tears her gaze away from her tree—her real tree, decorated with all the ornaments she and Polly made as children and she subsequently stole out of her mother’s attic—and turns around to face Jughead, wrapping her arms around his neck. Did he, she wonders, notice the neatly wrapped boxes with his name on them, or the stocking she’d chosen because it had a pointy jingle-bell cuff that reminded her of the brim of his old hat? 

(Her mother refused to relinquish her childhood stocking—which is fine, they’ll be spending Christmas day at her mother’s house anyway—so the crown-cuffed stocking hangs next to a cute candy-cane print one she’d bought for herself.)

“Hey, you,” she says quietly, studying his face as though she’s looking at him properly for the very first time. 

The pressure around her waist increases, and then he swoops her right off the ground and over to the couch. Whether Betty pulls him fully on top of her or whether he just climbs, she isn’t sure. Jughead presses almost his full weight onto her body, and she slides her hands under his sweater, pulling at his undershirt where it’s tucked into his jeans. 

Betty barely gets out a half-whispered “I missed you,” before his lips are on hers again; he kisses her hungrily, desperately, like he’s thought of doing nothing else since Thanksgiving. She wriggles underneath him a little, adjusting until she gets just the right friction when she pushes her hips up. When she finds it—the magic angle, the one that sends shivers radiating through her whole body—she smiles into him, pulls him closer, thinks she could be content to just do _this_ forever. 

But Jughead, it seems, cannot. He wrestles himself upright, breathing heavily, and pulls his sweater overhead. She watches goosebumps raise over his torso as the cold air hits his skin, places a hand on his chest and feels his nipple harden under her fingertips. 

“I can light a fire,” she says, preparing to swing her legs off the couch—but before she can start to move, Jughead shakes his head and starts tugging at her sweater, too. She helps him take off the sweater, and then her jeans and her bra and her underwear, too, and then he’s all over her, bare skin warm where it presses against hers. The contrast in temperature between her cold living room and her hot boyfriend is something Betty finds intensely pleasing to think about, until she loses Jughead’s body heat because he’s kissed all the way down across her lower belly and is now making a beeline for her clit. When he reaches it, she loses the power of cogent thought entirely. 

Through her half-closed eyes, the tree lights twinkle in semi-darkness, colored bulbs glinting and twinkling off the ends of her lashes until she can’t hold herself still anymore. She shudders against Jughead’s tongue, squeezing her eyes shut and keeping them that way even when the waves stop crashing over her. 

The couch cushions shift underneath her as Jughead pushes himself up enough to kiss from her navel to the hollow of her throat. 

“Hey,” he says softly. “You okay? Is something wrong?”

Betty feels a fingertip wiping softly against her face. Only then does she realize a single tear has leaked out of her. She opens her eyes and looks straight into Jughead’s, which are darkened with concern.

Nothing at all is wrong. Everything is too, too right. 

“No,” she says, firmly. _Fiercely_. “I’m great, Juggie.” 

He nods, but doesn’t look convinced. Betty kisses him with everything she can muster until he does.

  
  


She takes an uncharacteristic night shower after they’re done. When she comes downstairs afterwards, she finds Jughead sacked out on the sofa in his pajamas, mostly asleep under her old couch blanket, and one additional small package under the tree, neatly wrapped and bearing a simple tag: _To Betty_. 

After she’s unplugged the tree lights, she walks back to the couch and nudges Jughead’s foot with her knee. “Hey, sleepyhead,” she says, when his eyes flutter open. “Time for bed.” 

Jughead stifles a yawn. “Yes, ma’am.” After he sits up and stretches, he nods at the stockings. “Is the crown one for me?” 

“You can tell, huh?” 

He kisses her softly on her jawline, just under her ear, and whispers, “You’re so thoughtful.” 

She isn’t sure what makes her sadder: the fact that after all these years, Jughead still seems surprised whenever anyone does something thoughtful for him, or the fact that he’s one of the very few people who can tell her she’s thoughtful and make it sound just right, instead of how it usually sounds to her, like she’s either trying too hard or not trying hard enough.

  
  


Upstairs, he smiles at the new addition to her nightstand, a framed picture of the two of them at the state park outside of Toledo. It had taken a dozen tries to get a good shot with the self-timer on her phone’s camera; Jughead faux-protested over every single one after the first. But the results were worth his mock anguish. Betty’s heart had thumped hard when she’d first looked at this particular image, the last one they took. Her hair is a mess in the picture, loose and tangled around the hand Jughead has wrapped around her shoulder; Jughead is looking at her, not the camera. But they’re laughing—a rare picture in which Betty can tell not a single iota of her smile is faked—and it’s clear, _so_ clear, that there’s nowhere the two people in the picture would rather be than with each other. 

He runs a finger along the top edge of the frame, and says, “You printed it.” 

“I did.” 

“Maybe I should print it,” Jughead muses. “Hang it up on my fridge or something.” 

“Maybe you should.” 

(A second copy of the picture is already printed, framed, and waiting under her tree for him. That’s the gift she intends for him to unwrap here, in private, before they head to her mother’s house.) 

They fall asleep curled together, Betty the big spoon even though she’s smaller. He tugs her arm tight around his waist and threads their legs together. 

Sleep comes easily that night.

  
  


Much as Betty would prefer to spend the next few days holed up in her house, cuddling in front of the fire, this is not to be. 

“A Cooper Christmas is a weeklong affair,” she tells Jughead ruefully, over breakfast the next morning. “We’re going to have to be over there at least once a day, or my mom will riot.” 

He raises his eyebrows in a silent reminder that she’s been warning him about the forced merriment for weeks, and that he remembers Cooper Christmases from their childhood, anyway, and she already “put up” with his family over Thanksgiving, so she ought to stop being nervous on all of those accounts. 

“Just as long as I get cookies,” he says. 

“Actually, you know what? My mom’s going to love having you around. None of the rest of us will eat her fruitcake.” 

Jughead sets down his coffee. “What makes you think I will?”

  
  


He does eat the fruitcake. 

“He seems nervous around children, though,” Polly says, sounding disappointed as she, Betty, and Cheryl watch the twins, Jughead, and Jason through the kitchen window. 

The four of them had gone outside on the pretense of having a two-on-two snowball fight, but Jason and Juniper quickly became distracted by birdwatching, and Dagwood appears to be scraping lichen off a nearby tree with a paring knife Betty hopes he didn’t steal from her mother’s best set. Jughead looks back at the house from next to his stockpiled arsenal, shrugs, and starts rolling yet another snowball. 

Cheryl coughs politely. “To be fair, _I_ was nervous the first time Dagwood saw death omens in my tea leaves.” 

“But when you have kids—”

Betty nearly chokes on her hot chocolate. “Oh, my _god_ , Polly. We haven’t even come close to talking about that.” 

Polly’s brow furrows slightly. “Don’t you think you should?” 

A snowball whizzes over the fence that separates the Cooper’s backyard from the Andrews’, smacking Jughead squarely in the side of the head. He looks shocked for a moment, then ducks for an armful of his snowballs, and starts firing back at Archie. 

“ _Boys_ ,” Cheryl mutters, tossing her hair over her shoulder. “He appears to be fine with normal children, Betty. Our niece and nephew are simply… _exceptional_.”

  
  


On Christmas morning, Betty lights a fire while Jughead makes coffee. They sit together on the floor in front of the fireplace, still in their pajamas, and go through their stockings; she mostly knows what’s in hers (candy, oranges, unshelled walnuts), but Jughead snuck in a few of her favorite red pens and some fancy herbal tea. 

“You should unwrap this before we go to my mom’s,” she says, reaching over to grab the box with the framed picture in it. She knows there’s no reason the photo needs to be kept secret; after all, it’s very likely that one or more family members will eventually see the copy on her nightstand. But she hasn’t shown anyone else the picture, hasn’t posted it on social media; for now, at least, it’s theirs and theirs alone. 

(The other boxes for Jughead contain a nice journal—she knows he typically writes on his laptop, but the journal’s thick creamy paper and black pebbled leather cover were irresistible—and a couple of sets of nice kitchen towels and potholders, which she’d noticed were lacking in his kitchen.) 

Jughead tears through the paper and then chuckles when he sees what’s inside. “Always a step ahead of me, Cooper.” 

“Do you like it?” 

“I love it.” He leans over to kiss her. “I love _you_.” 

His present to her, the box he’d left under the tree, is also not for opening in front of her family. He looks uncharacteristically nervous as she unwraps it to find a box from a jewelry store. Inside the box, she finds a pendant, vintage emerald green glass rimmed in gold, on a delicate gold chain. 

“The pendant is by a local artist,” he explains, as she lifts the necklace from its velvet cushion. “Toledo’s a glass town, or was, back in the day. If you don’t like it, though—” 

“Jug, it’s beautiful.” Though the pendant isn’t one she would be likely to pick out for herself, it _is_ beautiful, and she knows she’ll wear it often. “You have good taste.” 

Jughead’s hands twitch towards the necklace, so Betty turns her back to him, kneeling while he fastens the clasp around her neck with such reverence that she wonders how long he’s wanted to do exactly that.

  
  


She pairs the necklace with a red V-neck sweater, and her mother presses her lips together and then says, “Well, you’re very festive, aren’t you?”

Even with that, it is, honestly, the best holiday season Betty can remember having in a very long time. 

Some of that, she knows, is due to the simple fact that having any kind of “outsider” at family gatherings keeps all her family members on their best behavior. Even the dreaded annual Boxing Day afternoon high tea with her father and Penelope Blossom had only been a little bit terrible. 

(In person, that is. She’d immediately deleted the long, crazy, ranting email she’d later received from her father, the one that included phrases like “good breeding” and “cursed bloodlines” without mentioning it to Jughead.)

But not all her contentment, her _happiness_ , can be attributed to the mere presence of a buffer. 

Most of it comes from Jughead.

  
  


They choose not to park in front of the television on New Year’s Eve, and instead take a private, chilly stroll through the woods behind Betty’s house. They ring in the new year there, alone except for each other, only knowing when the clock has struck midnight by the usual chorus of distant amateur fireworks. 

She tips her head up, fitting her lips to his. The gold necklace Jughead gave her for Christmas lies warm against her throat. 

After they’ve kissed, Jughead keeps Betty’s gloved hand in his and looks up—not straight up at the stars, but at the top of the treeline, like he’s trying to peer past the horizon. No fireworks are visible; the forest is thick even when its maple trees are bare, and she wonders what it is he’s looking for. 

“I never make New Year’s resolutions,” he says, “but I’m making one this year.” He pauses, taking a deep breath in. Betty watches the subsequent exhale, perfect silver clouds that hang suspended for just a moment before dissipating. “I’m going to get those query letters out. I’m going to get an agent. It’s time.” 

Betty nods in agreement, though her heart sinks just the tiniest bit. 

“I’m going to do that too,” she says. 

“Are you ever going to let me read what you’re working on?” 

She sighs, creating a smaller, less perfect silver cloud of her own. “Soon.” 

She knows his feedback will be useful, but something inside her keeps insisting that she needs to finish the first draft before she lets anyone read her work. Maybe it’s that she knows Jughead has already finished three novels, even if two of them are bad and none of them are published. Maybe she’s still not sure she _can_ write anything longer than a grad school paper.

Maybe she’s afraid of losing even the tiniest amount of Jughead’s respect. 

The minute that thought becomes clearly articulated in her mind, she shakes her head furiously, trying to dismiss it. Logically, rationally, that particular fear is stupid. She knows it’s stupid. 

Jughead looks at her with a somewhat concerned expression, and she stops shaking her head and smiles at him.

“Soon,” she repeats. “I promise.” 

They trudge back hand in hand, following their own tracks in the snow until they reach the house that’s never felt so much like home.

  
  


He flies home on the third of January, after a late breakfast at Pop’s. The day’s predicted snow is, mercifully, absent. 

On the curb outside the terminal, Jughead pulls her into a tight hug, and murmurs, “Is this getting easier or harder?” 

“I don’t know,” she admits. “I really don’t.” 

Even though she knows she should keep her hands at ten and two, Betty finds herself fidgeting with her green glass pendant the entire drive home from the Albany airport.

  
  


Midway through January, Betty gets the sensation that her jeans no longer fit right. She looks at herself in the mirror, shirtless, but can’t tell if it’s the waistband or the thighs or both. 

It figures, she thinks: the one year Alice Cooper _didn’t_ warn her about holiday weight gain. Reluctantly, she drags her old bathroom scale out of the back of the closet, strips off the offending jeans, takes a deep breath, and steps on. _Probably_ , logically, anything she’s feeling can be explained by the fact that it's that time of the month, but...

The scale reads exactly what it read the last time she stood on it, months ago. 

She pulls on some exercise clothes that have gone too long unused, pulls up a kickboxing workout on her tablet, and forces herself through it, cursing every minute. 

She feels better afterwards.

  
  


On a gray, miserable day at the beginning of February, Betty parks in her mother’s driveway and walks over to the Andrews house, her arms laden with baby blue and pastel yellow shower decorations. Archie and Brigitte are out, she knows; the baby shower isn’t a surprise, but she doesn’t want them doing any of the work. 

“Let me help you with that, Betty,” says Fred, hurrying down the porch steps with Mary close on his heels. 

“I’ve got it, thanks,” she says; Mary takes a bag out of her arms anyway. “There’s more in my car.” She nods in that direction, and Fred heads over. “I’m so glad you made it, Mary.” 

“My first grandchild? I couldn’t miss the shower.” She looks Betty over from tip to toe, and smiles. “You look wonderful.” 

“So do you,” Betty says honestly. Unlike her own mother, Mary actually seems to age—but gracefully. Every time Betty sees her, she looks more confident, more comfortable, in a way Betty can only hope she’ll manage to accomplish herself. 

“Betty,” Fred says, when he meets her again in the living room with the dessert in hand, “you didn’t bake this cake yourself, did you?” 

“I did.” 

Fred shakes his head, a familiar fond look in his eyes. “It’s too much.” 

“It’s just a cake,” Betty says. “Archie’s been my best friend since we were four. Throwing the baby shower is the least I can do.” 

“Well, I know the kids appreciate it. We do, too.”

She and Fred and Mary have gotten most of the decorations up by the time Alice Cooper arrives from next door to help finish and be judgmental.

  
  


Brigitte’s mood swings have been minimal, but she cries happy tears over everything from the real cake to the diaper cake to Betty’s gift of a stuffed yellow Labrador retriever to the tiny sweater, hand-knit by Alice Cooper, in royal blue and gold to look like Archie’s old letterman jacket. 

(Archie almost cries over the stuffed dog, too. A decade after his passing, Vegas Andrews is still deeply missed.) 

“These are from Jughead,” she says, passing over what she knows to be a stack of picture books. 

Archie looks up, surprised. “I didn’t know Jug was going to send something.” 

“How is he doing?” Brigitte asks, her fingers tracing over her rounded belly in a reassuring gesture that seems unconscious. “I wish he could have been here for this.” 

Betty smiles—her practiced smile, the one she’s been practicing since she was a little girl, the one that’s so accomplished not even her mother can tell it isn’t genuine. 

“Me too,” she says. “Me too.” 

Fred and Mary exchange a subtle, wistful glance over Archie’s head, and Betty’s thoughts slip back to when she was thirteen, when looking into Archie’s bedroom window had first started feeling _different_ , when Mary had quietly departed Riverdale for a life of her own.

  
  


That night, she tucks her phone between her ear and her shoulder while she talks to Jughead, and contemplates the inches of skin exposed on her legs when she sits on the sofa with her feet on the cushions and her knees bent, and her pajama pants hike up at the ankles. She’s due for a shave—overdue, really—but who’s going to know or care? She rubs a hand back and forth over the stubble until her palm becomes pleasantly numb. 

“Still can’t believe someone’s letting Archie be responsible for a baby,” he says. “Remember all those times he tried to take pizza out of the oven without using the mitts?” 

A slow chuckle leaves her, although she doesn’t find the memory very funny right now. 

“Jug?” She’s hesitant to ask, for some reason, even though it’s a normal enough question, and something you really ought to know about the person you love. “Do you want kids someday?” 

He’s silent for just long enough for Betty to contemplate adding _Not necessarily with me_. Once she thinks those unfortunate words, she can’t help but imagine Jughead having children with some mystery woman, can’t help but picture him holding hands with a couple of dark-haired, knobby-kneed little boys in tiny crown beanies as they cross a tree-lined suburban street to a playground while an out-of-focus female figure looks on. The image makes her heart hurt. 

“Yeah,” he says, at last. “I think so. I’ve just always been afraid of—of not being up to the task, you know? I had such a sparkling role model for fatherhood.” 

_You had Fred, too_ , she thinks, but she bites her lip instead of saying so, knowing those words will only hurt him. Instead, she says, “Yeah, I know. My mom…I love her, but I would never want to be that way with my own kids.” 

“You wouldn’t be,” he says, and then, “You do want them, though?” 

“I do,” she says. “Maybe not now, or not soon. But eventually, yes.” 

She imagines Jughead nodding slowly. She imagines his index finger and thumb rubbing together. 

“So I guess we’re on the same page, then,” he says. 

Betty nods slowly herself. “I guess we are.”

  
  


A few days later, she realizes they’ve never discussed marriage, not even in the abstract. 

She lets herself conjure up memories of her childhood dream wedding, which turns out to be a bad idea; the old dreams are so old that she’s marrying Archie in all of them, and the wedding looks exactly like the pictures of her own parents’ marriage, right down to the horrible 1990s wedding dress—and look how _that_ marriage had turned out, in the end. 

Barefoot on a beach, her hair flowing in the breeze; prim and proper in a church with a veil over her eyes; at the county courthouse in a knee-length skirt suit—none of it seems right. 

She opens a bottle of wine.

  
  


On February 14th, she gets a text at lunchtime, just as she’d anticipated. 

_The cheesy jokes write themselves, Betty_ , Jughead says, the caption to a picture of him holding up the heart-shaped pizza she’d had delivered to his office. 

She smiles at the image of her boyfriend, who seems so close and so far away at the same time, and resists the urge to kiss the screen. 

Instead, she writes back _I love you too_.

  
  


“Sabrina says we’re, quote, ‘hashtag life goals,’ by the way,” she tells Jughead that night, over video chat. 

“Because of the flowers?” 

Betty glances over at the display currently on her kitchen table, which she’d brought home from school: not roses, but a more unruly and nontraditional mix of flowers, lilies and carnations and baby’s breath, all of it vibrant and springlike. 

“Because I looked happy today.” 

She sees Jughead swallow hard. “Betts,” he says, quietly, “you are happy, right?” 

“Of course,” Betty says. “Of course I am.” 

“Because you don’t look very happy right now.” 

“I am. Really. I—” She pauses for a moment, looking to the ceiling as she collects her thoughts. “It’s just… I didn’t realize how lonely I was until you came back into my life. And I wouldn’t trade what we have for anything, but—well, I’m still lonely a lot of the time.” 

Jughead exhales forcefully, one hand worrying his lips and chin. “We’ll see each other soon,” he says, sounding like he’s trying to convince himself as much as he is her. “Your spring break is the second week of April. That’s not _so_ far away.” 

It’s seven weeks away, but Betty nods in agreement anyway. “Should I come there? We never decided, but it’s my turn.” 

“Toledo is the worst spring break destination I can think of,” he says, with a sarcastic sort of chuckle. “You know, it doesn’t have to be one or the other. We could go—well, anywhere.” 

The beach, Betty thinks at once, but no; that’s where everyone else will be going. 

“Jug, I don’t have a ton of disposable income,” she says gently. “I have the mortgage, and I’m still paying off my grad school loans.” 

He nods. “I don’t have much either, honestly.” 

“We could meet in the middle, maybe,” she suggests. “I could—if it was somewhere I could drive, if there wasn’t any airfare, I could do a hotel.” 

“We could, but the middle is basically Buffalo.” Jughead smiles, a small and gentle smile that she wants to kiss right off his face. “I think that might be an even more depressing spring break location than Toledo.” 

“I hear Niagara Falls is romantic.” 

“For a whole week?” 

“Well,” Betty says, leaning forward just a little to display the tiniest bit more cleavage, “who says we’d be leaving the hotel room?” 

Just as she’d intended, Jughead groans.

  
  


That weekend, she ensconces herself in a booth at Pop’s, the one Jughead used to favor back in high school, and writes more than she’s written in weeks. The words flow from her fingers like bubbles down the Sweetwater. 

The sound of something hitting her table startles her out of her concentration: a plate containing a grilled cheese on sourdough and side salad with buttermilk ranch. Betty looks up into Pop Tate’s smiling face. 

“I didn’t order this, Pop.”

“I know,” he says. “But you look like you could use it.”

She puts the final touches (well, not the _final_ touches, but the final touches of the first draft) on the last chapter the next Friday night, transcribing the notes she’d written by hand on a piece of scrap paper while her students took a quiz earlier that afternoon.

  
  


One Sunday, one glorious Sunday when it’s raining cats and dogs in both Toledo and Riverdale (having identical weather makes her feel closer to him, somehow), she asks if he’s ready to read her secret project. 

“Finally?” he says, raising his eyebrows. “I thought you’d never let me see it.” 

She feels almost bashful as she hits send on the email. “I was waiting until the first draft was done.”

Betty worries the end of her ponytail between two fingers while he skims the introductory paragraphs. Her heart pounds in rhythm with the downpour, equal measures of blood and and adrenaline racing in torrents through her veins, while she watches Jughead read. 

After a bit, he looks back at the screen, eyes twinkling. “Betts,” he says, slowly, “is this a young adult murder mystery?” 

She feels a smile break across her face as she nods. “I was thinking—I mean, I don’t want to get ahead of myself, I don’t even know if anyone will be interested in this one—but I was thinking it could be a series, you know? A modern-day Nancy Drew.” 

Jughead chuckles. “I can already see you in the protagonist.” 

“Just because she has a blonde ponytail,” Betty protests. “She’s not really me. She’s—she’s more like the me I wish I had been. Braver, you know?”

  
  


About three hours after they hang up, Jughead calls her back. 

“She’s you,” he says at once, not even bothering with a hello, and Betty begins pacing back and forth in front of her office window. “She’s not braver than you were. You were exactly this brave. We just didn’t have murders to solve.” 

A mostly-pleasant hot flush washes over her entire body. “So what do you think so far?” 

“So far? Jughead echoes. “I read the whole thing in one sitting, Betts. Couldn’t put it down.” 

Grinning quietly to herself, Betty plops down in her desk chair and tucks a leg underneath her. 

“I have some notes on your red herrings, though,” he adds. 

“Hang on. I just need to find a pen,” Betty says, reaching for the pencil cup on her desk with one hand and a stray legal pad with the other. “Okay. Shoot.”

  
  


August Alfred Andrews arrives in the middle of the night at the end of March, seven pounds and eleven ounces of squish topped in fine ginger fuzz. Betty goes to meet him the next afternoon, armed with takeout for the new parents and tearful well-wishes from Pop Tate. 

“He’s beautiful,” she says, as Archie carefully places the swaddled little bundle in her arms. She bounces August lightly, and he wrinkles his face. “Good job, guys.” 

Archie, exhausted but content, runs a hand through his hair so that it all stands on end. “It’s weird. I was afraid he’d just look like all the other babies, you know? All newborns look kind of alike. But he—I can tell he’s ours.” 

“It’s the red hair,” says Brigitte, from her hospital bed. 

“No.” Archie leans over the baby, booping him lightly on the nose. “He looks like his mommy.” 

“He looks like both of you,” Betty says diplomatically. (Truth be told, aside from the hair, August _does_ look exactly like every other newborn she’s ever seen, red and swollen.) “How’s your dad doing? I thought I’d see him here.” 

“He’s great,” Archie says. “He went home to shower; he was in the waiting room all night. And my mom’s on the way,” he adds. “Her flight should be landing any minute now.” 

“And your parents?” Betty asks Brigitte. 

“At the hotel. They got here this morning.” Brigitte clears her throat. “Archie, do you want to…” 

“Oh, yeah! Yeah. Um, Betty? We wanted to ask—you’ll be Auggie’s godmother, won’t you? We can’t think of anyone better.” 

“Of course I will,” Betty says, deliberately keeping her eyes glued to the baby’s tiny face. 

A wave of feelings washes over her, but she doesn’t want to sort through them now. Not now, while bittersweet tears are starting to sting behind her eyelids. Not now, while the little stone in the pit of her stomach seems to be growing larger, weighing her down. 

Not now, because now is not about her. 

She bounces the baby again. “I would be honored to be your godmother, August.” 

From the corner of her eye, she can see Brigitte giving her a fond, exhausted smile. 

“Betty?” Archie says again, more hesitantly this time. “Do you—do you think Jughead might want to be his godfather?” 

She blinks, and thankfully, all the gathering tears—happy, sad, somewhere in between— stay firmly in place. “I don’t know, Archie,” she says. “You’ll have to ask him yourself.”

  
  


On her computer screen, Jughead’s eyebrows lift. “August Alfred Andrews,” he says. “Triple-A. _That_ won’t get him teased on the playground.” 

“It could be so much worse.” 

“That it could,” Jughead agrees. “Trust me, I know.” 

“The thing I can’t get over—and I feel bad even saying this, but— _August_? For a baby born in March?” 

Jughead chuckles. “That makes perfect sense for Archie, somehow.” 

“And the middle name is after Fred, of course.” She pauses, thinking. “I always thought Fred was short for Frederick. You’d think that’s something I would have known.” 

“August Alfred Andrews,” Jughead says a second time. “But Auggie for short, you said? And they want me to be his godfather?” 

“I told Archie he should ask you himself, but yeah. Expect a phone call when they’re less tired.” 

“I’ve met Brigitte about three times,” he says. “Shouldn’t it be someone they both know?” 

“It’s not an obligation, Jug. If you don’t want to—” 

He shakes his head slightly, and Betty wishes she could reach through the screen and brush her fingers against that permanently unruly lock of hair. 

“I guess this solves the question of who’s traveling where for your spring break, huh?” He brushes back the lock of hair himself. “I’ve gotta come meet my godson.”

  
  


  
  


(to be continued…)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a hot minute since I updated this fic. Sorry about that. Thanks to village-skeptic and heartunsettledsoul for everything. 
> 
> As always - I would adore a comment, when you have the time.


	10. Chapter 10

Just before they enter the church, Jughead tightens his grip on Betty’s waist ever so slightly, a gentle squeeze intended to hold her back. It works. She turns to him, wide eyes made greener by her fuschia silk dress, and waits. 

“You’re sure it doesn’t matter that I’m not religious?” 

The corners of Betty’s lips turn up in the tiniest of smiles. “I’m sure. Archie and Brigitte aren’t really either, you know, and neither am I. And I’m Polly’s twins’ godmother, and those two have been in a church _maybe_ six times in their lives, all of which were because my mother dragged them at either Christmas or Easter.” 

He nods once, then swallows, hoping the action will help alleviate the dryness in his mouth. It does not. 

“Come on,” she says gently, wrapping her hand around the crook of his elbow. “We have to go inside.” 

He nods again, and they follow the Andrews clan through the heavy wooden doors. 

Jughead has not been in a church since the last time he was in this one, seven and a half years ago, for his father’s funeral. He’d wondered then, too, if it made a difference that he wasn’t formally a member of any religion, or that his parents had never taken him to church regularly when he was a child. He thinks they had him baptized or christened at some point, but the fact that he isn’t sure...

(Nor is he sure of the difference between a baptism and a christening, or if there even _is_ a difference between the two, and he can’t help but feel that on some level, his religious illiteracy ought to disqualify him from being a godfather.) 

At least he’s wearing a different suit than the last time he’d been inside this church, a _new_ suit, one that doesn’t have the grief of funerals woven into the fabric. He shouldn’t have spent money on a new suit, but he did, under some sort of perverse adult logic that popped up after Archie had called and officially asked him to be August’s godfather. _You’re pushing thirty_ , said his brain; _you should have a better suit_. This new one is dark blue, not black, and came with alterations included. He’d figured that meant it must be decent enough. 

(Betty confirmed that this was the case an hour ago, when she’d come out of the bathroom still fastening her left earring, raised her eyebrows at the sight of him, and said, simply, “Fuck, Jug.”

But—amongst other considerations—they’d already been running late.) 

He stands next to Betty at the altar, one hand back on the curve of her trim waist, and promises he’ll always be there for the wailing red-haired bundle in his former best friend’s arms. 

He means it, too. Even if he’ll be there from a distance.

  
  


(“Why me?” he’d asked Archie, when Archie had called him three days after Auggie’s birth. “I don’t live in Riverdale. We’ve barely even seen each other in the last ten years.” 

Archie, who’s changed so much and yet not at all, hadn’t even hesitated. “The godparents are the people you trust to raise your kid if anything happens to you, Jug,” he’d said. “That’s Betty and you, whether or not you’re together. I mean, if anything happens to me and Brigitte and our parents are still around, then one of them will take care of him. But if they can’t—” 

Archie swallowed then, and in his mind’s eye, Jughead saw the two of them at eight years old, hidden away behind a pile of lumber at a construction site and swearing they’d be brothers forever. 

“You’d trust me to raise a kid? _Your_ kid?” 

“Well, yeah,” Archie had said, as though he’d been telling Jughead that Pop Tate still served the best burgers in town. “Who else would I trust?”)

  
  


There’s a small party at the Andrews house afterwards. Light refreshments are served—“tea sandwiches,” according to Alice Cooper, whatever _those_ are—and Jughead finds himself contemplating a very tiny triangle filled with cream cheese and watercress while Betty flits about as though she owns the place, effortlessly conversing with guests and refilling drinks and helping hold the baby all at once.

“People actually eat this, huh?” he muses aloud, entirely to himself. He’d always imagined, somehow, that watercress wasn’t real, that it existed solely in the pages of Victorian novels. 

“Of course we do.” Cheryl Blossom appears in his view, clearly as unimpressed with Jughead as Jughead is with watercress. “I’d ask if you were raised in a barn, but I already know the answer to that question.” 

“It’s nice to see you too, Cheryl.” 

“You’ve cleaned up in a respectable fashion, at least.” 

Jughead deliberately crams the entire sandwich in his mouth before replying, though it’s _so_ tiny that the gesture is barely impolite at all. He swallows. “Thanks, I think.” 

Affecting not to notice either the watercress he’s sure is now stuck between his teeth or his attempt to subtly pick it out, Cheryl reaches for a tiny sandwich of her own. She nibbles delicately on its corner, and pointedly swallows what must be a grand total of three crumbs before deigning to ask, “So, how’s America’s hellish swampland treating you?” 

“Fine,” he says; Ohio is neither hellish nor a swampland, but he sees where this is going, and he won’t rise to this particular bit of Cheryl’s bait. “How are the comparatively miniscule maple forests of upstate New York treating you?” 

Cheryl smiles in such a way that makes him realize he must have taken the bait after all. “Everything’s going well, thank you. In fact, Blossom Maple Farms is doing _so_ well that my accountant tells me we’ll need to start a nonprofit organization, just for the tax breaks.” She pauses. “And the charity, of course.” 

“Charity from a Blossom? Never thought I’d see the day.” 

“I’m not a _monster_ , Jughead. Goodness. What must you think of me?” Her tone is light, and he knows she’s not offended, but this nevertheless seems like a decent enough time to extend the proverbial olive branch. 

“I think I probably didn’t give you enough credit in high school,” he admits. “Based on what Betty’s told me, anyway.” 

Cheryl looks positively delighted—not in an unguarded way, as Betty tends to do, but with precision; she’s a little red sports car switching on and off her high beams, as the situation requires. 

“I’m on the other side of thirty, you know,” she says. “It feels like time to leave a positive mark on the world. My father’s activities in the underworld of illegal substances left quite a stain on Riverdale, and it would be nice to rebalance the karmic ledger in at least some small way.” 

“So what’s this nonprofit going to do?” 

“The details are still under consideration, but you can imagine, I’m sure. Underprivileged children. Helping them along in life. That sort of thing.” 

“Ah. Indoctrinating the Southside youth?” 

“ _Encouraging_ the Southside youth,” Cheryl says, gently—well, gently by Cheryl Blossom standards. “Offering them academic and social support. There is a difference, you know.” 

Jughead reaches for another stupidly tiny sandwich, careful not to drag the cuff of his new suit jacket through a rogue smear of cream cheese on the serving platter. 

He does know. He knows better than Cheryl can ever hope to. 

Buying a nice new suit—setting foot in a department store, pretending he had an opinion on lapel width and wool weight, actually getting the damn thing tailored—had been only the latest rung on the ladder he thinks he’s mostly climbed by now, the metaphorical one from “trailer park kid” to “acceptably middle-class.” He’d begun ascending that ladder when his mother had yanked him and J.B. out of Riverdale and, by some miracle, deposited Jughead in one of Toledo’s best public high schools, the one with the guidance counselor who’d insisted he apply to better colleges than he would ever have hoped would accept him, or that he could afford to attend. 

(She had been entirely correct, and if he ever gets that damn novel published, her name will be right up there on his list of acknowledgements.) 

Will Cheryl be hiring a guidance counselor or two, he wonders? Test prep tutors? Will she find some way to offer extracurriculars, help pad out the admissions files of those who’ve been doomed to a lifetime of underfunded southside schools? He’d been lucky enough to avoid them himself—how, he’s never been entirely sure—but he knows Southside High barely even had foreign language textbooks, let alone a Spanish club or organized sports. 

When he looks up from the food, prepared to ask, Cheryl’s halfway across the room with her arms outstretched, jockeying for a turn holding August.

  
  


He wanders into the kitchen after Cheryl leaves him, intending to see if there’s any more food he can either bring out for Betty or simply eat himself, but finds he’s not the only one to have temporarily abandoned the main event. 

“There you are, Jug.” Fred smiles at him, rumpled and grandfatherly in a striped seersucker sport coat that Betty had earlier declared _adorable_. “Glad you could make it for this.” 

“Yeah, so am I.” 

A hand—lightly spotted with age, a little calloused, and a dead ringer for what Jughead imagines his own father’s hands would look like now—lands on his shoulder. 

“Glad you agreed to be Auggie’s godfather, too,” he says. “Can’t think of anyone better.” 

Jughead takes a sip of the lemonade that’s in his hand, trying to wash down the small lump in the back of his throat. He shrugs. “Archie made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.” 

Fred’s head tilts back slightly, and for a few long seconds, he simply regards Jughead. Then he turns the shoulder-clap into a solid pat. “You’re slipping, kid,” he says. “The Godfather is the one who makes the offers.” 

He’s still contemplating whether or not this merits a comeback when Fred withdraws his hand and takes the two steps over to the fridge, which he opens.

“You know, there’s more than lemonade in here, Jug. You want a beer?” 

“I’m fine, thanks,” Jughead replies. “Never have been much of a drinker.” 

He hears the pop and hiss of a bottle cap. Fred straightens up and crosses his arms over his chest as he takes his first sip. 

“As _your_ godfather,” he says, “I gotta say, I think that’s probably for the best.” 

“Are you?” Jughead blurts out. “My godfather? I wasn’t even sure I was—whatever.”

“Well, yeah, of course. And your dad was Archie’s. You were both christened on the same day, as a matter of fact.” 

Jughead suddenly has a million questions, but before he can formulate any of them into sentences, Betty sticks her head into the kitchen. 

“Can one of you bring in the tiered tray with the petits fours?” 

“On it,” Jughead tells her. The smile she gives him when he brings it into the living room is bright enough to light up the whole damn town.

  
  


“That was _exhausting_ ,” Betty groans, when they’re back at her house. She plops down into a kitchen chair and takes off her heels. “I’m never co-hosting another party. Remind me of that.” 

“You were going strong all day.” Jughead’s pretty certain that in eleven and a half months, Betty will be on her hands and knees in the Andrews’ kitchen, wiping cake crumbs from the floor at Auggie’s first birthday party, and that neither Archie nor Brigitte will have explicitly asked her to do so. “Can I get you anything? Water? Coffee? That gross tea you like?”

“No.” She chuckles a little as Jughead crosses the room to stand behind her chair. He puts his hands on her shoulders, squeezing lightly, and Betty reaches up to put her right hand over his. “I’m good, thanks, I—oh. Yes. Right there.” 

Her hair is in the way, so he gathers it in one hand and tucks it in front of her shoulder. Outside, a cloud must have just finished passing in front of the sun, because now warm afternoon light streams through her gauzy kitchen curtains, highlighting the side of her just so: the soft curve of her ear, the sharp angle of her jawline, the drape of the necklace he’d given her for Christmas across her collarbones. He follows _that_ line down to the end of the chain, to the round green pendant that rests just above the swell of her breasts. 

For a few breaths, he keeps his hands where they are, lightly massaging her shoulders while he watches the rise and fall of her chest as she breathes. But it’s too much— _she’s_ too much—and before he can quite stop himself, he’s leaning over her from behind the chair, nuzzling a kiss onto that perfectly soft spot where her neck and jawline meet, and enjoying the tiny gasp she tries to conceal when he adds a tiny bit of suction. 

“Have I told you how good you look in this dress?” he mutters, hating himself a little for succumbing to such a mundane sentiment. But he’d had too many thoughts throughout the day, thoughts about Betty and the dress and those high heels (and Betty _out_ of the dress and those high heels) that he was, and is, one hundred percent certain one ought not to have in a church, and had therefore repressed. They’re all coming back now in her kitchen, flooding his senses, and— 

He snaps back to reality when Betty laughs. 

“Jug.” Her voice is fond but exasperated. “You have the _weirdest_ , I swear—” 

“The weirdest what?” he says, feeling just the tiniest bit insulted as he stands up straight. 

“Nothing,” she sighs. It’s a happy sigh, or so he hopes. “You keep getting turned on by all these outfits that are explicitly not sexy. This, what I wear to teach in—” 

“Who says those outfits aren’t sexy?” 

“Me, Jug. I do. Anything that’s appropriate to wear to church is not intended to be sexy.” 

“So it’s just you that’s sexy, then.” 

Betty laughs again, a small and delighted sound, and twists at the waist to look at him. “You’re ridiculous, you know.” She tugs on his necktie, and he willingly ducks down to give her a proper kiss. 

“Are you sure you don’t want to?” He skims a hand over her hip. It was inevitable that at some point one of their visits would conflict unfavorably with Betty’s menstrual cycle, and he accepts that, _but_. “I mean, people do.” 

Her nose scrunches up, adorably. “I know people have period sex, but I… it sounds gross to me. And everything down there just kind of feels off. Two more days, okay?” She smiles, and kisses him again. “Trust me, I’ve been having all kinds of impure thoughts too. I’ve been waiting all day to rip this suit off you.” 

“You still could,” he offers, trying not to sound _too_ eager about the prospect. 

She does, right there in her kitchen, starting with the necktie and ending with his boxers. By the time she gets to those, he’s so turned on he’s almost lightheaded, certain every drop of blood in his body has rushed to his lower half. 

Betty shoves him against the refrigerator door with a mischievous look in her eyes, which she keeps focused on his as she licks her thumb and slides it over him. He shudders, already unbearably hard, and Betty grins. 

“Eyes on me,” she says, dropping slowly to her knees before him. She doesn’t break eye contact even when her lips meet her thumb, and he shudders again. 

He knocks three magnets off the refrigerator when he comes.

  
  


The rest of the week, unfortunately, is less satisfying—though not in the sexual sense. Betty has apparently re-taken up kickboxing over the last few months (“I was into it for a while when I lived in New York; I was taking classes for self-defense”) and once her period has subsided, she’s all too eager to demonstrate her newly rebuilt stamina. 

The sex is still great. The sex is better than ever. 

It’s clouded, though, by the horrible thought that won’t leave the back of Jughead’s mind: these are the last of his accrued vacation days. From here on out, he won’t be able to take paid time off at the drop of a hat. And he can’t afford to take unpaid time off, not if he’s going to be buying all these plane tickets. He’d done a little math before he bought this last ticket, and came to the conclusion that once he factored together gas, hotels, restaurants, and all the time he’d waste, driving to Riverdale instead wasn’t worth doing. 

If they could just push Toledo and Riverdale a little closer together until they figured things out. If they only lived two hours apart, or even three or four, this would all be so much easier. 

But geography doesn’t work that way, and Jughead knows it. He’s always known it.

  
  


Betty seems to be deliberately avoiding the subject of when they’ll see each other again, and truth be told, Jughead isn’t keen to bring it up either. He’d rather spend the limited time they have together _being together_. 

He’s just about convinced himself that the discussion can wait until they’re separated again. Just about. 

As usual, Betty has other plans.

  
  


She starts the conversation at what he thinks might be the worst possible moment, when he’s just gotten back from one of the runs he hates but still forces himself to go on at least twice a week. He’s sweaty and thirsty and sneezing uncontrollably from some form of springtime pollen he was never allergic to as a kid, and all he wants to do now is to take a shower and eat something—but he comes back into the house and finds Betty at the kitchen table with a mug of herbal tea, her brow furrowed in the way it used to furrow in high school, every time a member of her family did something that upset her. 

He knows this furrow well. 

“Betts? Is everything okay?” 

“It’s been six months, Jug,” she says, her voice soft. “How long are we going to keep doing this?” 

Jughead’s knees go the slightest bit wobbly. He grabs a glass of water before he sits opposite her, taking the time to try and organize his thoughts. 

“What do you mean?” He hopes he sounds cautious, but fears he actually sounds suspicious instead. 

“We’ve been doing this for six months.” She’s been worrying at her cuticles, he can tell; one of them is split, and a little bloody. “Six months is a long time.” 

“Six months isn’t that long. It wouldn’t seem like that long if we’d been living in the same place.”

“But we haven’t been,” she says. “When do you think we might be?” 

Jughead takes a deep breath in and then exhales slowly, fighting the urge to sneeze, as he had sneezed so many times on his run. “I don’t know,” he admits, after he’s successfully fought the urge and blown his nose into a paper napkin left on the table from breakfast instead. “And not just when. _Where_ would we be?” 

Betty blinks, her expression completely baffled, and in the split second before she opens her mouth, Jughead realizes _exactly_ what she’s going to say. He realizes it, and he bristles against the words before they even leave her mouth. 

“What do you mean, where? Why wouldn’t we live here?” 

“Why wouldn’t we live in Toledo?” Jughead doesn’t _think_ he’s asked the question unkindly, but Betty visibly recoils anyway, jerking back in her chair as though he’d just threatened to slap her. 

“Why would I move to Toledo?” 

“Because I live there,” he says, pointedly. “I have a job there. My family’s there.” 

“Well, I have a job here, and my family’s here,” she retorts. “I have a _mortgage_.” 

This last detail strikes him as rather irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. “So you’re suggesting I uproot everything—” 

“No!” Betty cries. “I mean, yes. I guess I am. I’m asking you to consider moving in with me. Or at least back to Riverdale.” 

She stands up, folding her arms across her chest as she moves to stand at the kitchen window, and he can see that she hadn’t expected him to react quite like this; he can see that she’s fighting back tears. But they’ve started the discussion. They might as well finish it now. 

“Betty.” There are so many ways that what he’s about to say could go wrong, and he tries to choose both his words and his tone carefully. _Keep it neutral_ , he tells himself, uncertain as to whether that’s a reasonably accomplished goal. “I’m not just going to be… what, a kept boyfriend? What exactly would I do for work in Riverdale?” 

“You’re a writer. You can write anywhere.” 

“I can’t get _paid_ to write anywhere,” he points out; he knows she knows that as well as he does. “Not a living wage, anyway. What am I going to do here, work for your mom? I don’t think so.” 

“No,” she admits, almost smiling. “That would be a terrible idea.” 

“And you could be a high school English teacher anywhere,” he counters. 

“I don’t think I could be as happy in Toledo as you could be in Riverdale, Jug.” Betty’s far from smiling now. “I just—I didn’t think you liked your job so much you wouldn’t be willing to leave it. I didn’t think you liked _Toledo_ that much. I know your family’s there, and I know they’re important to you, but I didn’t think you were so attached to the city.”

The idea of moving back to Riverdale is not upsetting to him, precisely; of _course_ he’s thought about moving back to Riverdale, even if only in the most abstract of terms. What’s upsetting to him is the idea that Betty seems to take it for granted that he should be the one to move. 

There’s a horrible underlying assumption to that conviction, one to which he thinks Betty is blind, and one which he knows he cannot spell out to her, because he does not want to make her cry: that she is worth moving halfway across the country for, and he is not. 

He swallows down the hurt and stands up. “I’m going to take a shower, okay?” 

Still standing at the window, still crossing her arms tightly over her chest, Betty nods. 

They talk politely about other, unrelated subjects for the rest of the day.

  
  


They’re in bed, both on their backs, staring at the ceiling instead of each other, when he tentatively brings it up again. 

“You could come to Toledo for an extended visit during the summer, maybe,” he suggests. “While you’re on break. I know my apartment’s small, but—we could make it work.” 

He imagines it like an artist’s residency for her: she could take her laptop to coffee shops, to libraries, to the art museum, and finish her young adult novel. They could go on cheap weekend trips on his bike. Hell, he could teach her to ride the bike herself. 

“I don’t really have much of a break, remember? I’m teaching summer school.” 

“Right, right.” He thinks for a moment, and decides to bring up another idea, one that’s appeared vaguely at the fringes of his conscious mind from time to time but which he’s never allowed to take substance before. “You know, this isn’t an either-or thing. It doesn’t have to be Toledo or Riverdale. We could live anywhere.” 

Betty exhales deeply, and rolls over to face him, propping herself up on one elbow. “I know this town has some bad memories for you, Jug. It does for me, too. And I know it’s small and sleepy and not much ever happens. But I like living here. I chose to come back.” 

“I know,” he says. “I know.” 

She snuggles next to him, first tucking herself under his arm and then throwing a leg over his. It feels like she’s trying to hold him as close as she possibly can, so close he can’t escape. Jughead finds he doesn’t mind the connotations as much as he probably ought to. After all, it’s not as though he wants to go anywhere. 

Neither of them puts voice to what Jughead is thinking, what he assumes Betty is thinking too: what if, _what if_ , one or both of them uproot their lives for each other, and this thing between them doesn’t work out? 

“I can’t really leave Riverdale for an extended period of time,” Betty says. “But I do have two weeks between the end of regular school and the beginning of summer school.” 

Jughead perks up at once. “You want to spend them with me?” 

“Of course I do.” The words come out quietly, and a little bit sad. He wonders if he accidentally insinuated, at some point, that he thinks she wouldn’t. “I didn’t buy a ticket yet, but I was looking while you were brushing your teeth, and it’s doable.” She pauses for a moment. “I was thinking—I know you can’t take more time off work, but maybe we could go on a short weekend trip? Chicago, or…I don’t know. Columbus, even.” 

“We can do that,” he says, already feeling a phantom Betty on his motorcycle, pressed against him. “We can definitely do that.” 

“I love you,” Betty murmurs sleepily into his chest. “So much, Jug.” 

His heart beats so hard that it almost feels sore. “I love you too.” 

It’s been six months. But, in the grand scheme of their lives, six months is not a very long time at all.

  
  


“Six months,” Toni says, rather glumly. 

Jughead looks up, though his hand continues on its journey into the communal donut box—unfortunately for him, since he immediately sticks his thumb into the center of a Bavarian cream, which was not the one he’d been aiming for. It’s his now, though, he supposes, so he pulls it from the box and gives Toni a “What?” before sticking the thumb in his mouth. 

Toni rolls her eyes at him, then tilts her head at the break room door, towards the main offices. “This place,” she says. “Rumors started flying while you were shacking up in the hinterlands. Word on the street is that everyone ought to start polishing up their portfolios.” 

“We’ve heard those rumors before,” Jughead points out. “There’s a rumor we’re shutting down in six months about—” 

“About once every six months. I know.” Toni crosses over to him and peers into the donut box. “Oh, come on, Jughead. You took the last Bavarian cream?” 

He holds the donut out to her, on its flimsy paper plate, but she scoffs.

“Dude. I don’t want it if your thumb’s been in it.” She takes the chocolate frosted he’d been eyeing for his second donut instead. 

He doesn’t take the rumor seriously until two weeks later, when the communal donuts stop appearing in the break room.

  
  


He polishes up his résumé and portfolio anyway, something he hasn’t bothered to do since he got this job; consequently, the portfolio part takes an entire week of digging through digital archives and old thumb drives and his email cloud looking for his pieces, and another entire week of deciding which ones he hates least. 

What he should do is ask Betty for advice. He loads up a folder on his personal cloud, prepared to send it to her, but… 

But he can’t bring himself to do it. 

If he sends Betty a half-curated portfolio, she might think he’s looking for jobs in Riverdale, and get her hopes up. If he sends Betty a half-curated portfolio, and he tells her he’s _not_ looking for jobs in Riverdale, she’ll be unbearably hurt. Imagining either scenario is downright painful, and so he does not send Betty a half-curated portfolio. 

He does start looking for appropriate journalism jobs in upstate New York. As he’d expected, there are none. There don’t even seem to be any inappropriate journalism jobs in the area. He sets up an email alert, fully expecting it to never return anything of interest. 

Sighing to himself, Jughead stares blankly at his computer until the screen starts to go dim. 

He still refrains from mentioning anything to Betty. 

  
  


He sits at his mother’s kitchen table, dragging the tines of his fork through the swirl of cake frosting left on his plate. 

“You’re okay with J.B. moving in with this dude?” he mutters, hoping neither J.B. nor the dude in question will hear him from the front door, where they’re saying goodbye to each other. Aiden seems nice enough. But he’s wearing what Jughead takes as homemade denim cutoff shorts and rubber flip-flops to J.B.’s family birthday dinner, he has a handlebar mustache, and Jughead’s about fifty percent sure he’s seen either this guy or his clone waiting tables at Toni’s stupid favorite brunch restaurant, all of which seem like unforgivable offenses. 

(When, he wonders—when did _Toledo_ grow hipsters? And shouldn’t a city that can support avocado toast and single-origin pour-overs also be able to support independent alt-weeklies?) 

Gladys shrugs. She looks no more and no less tired than she’s looked for Jughead’s whole life. “She’s an adult. I can’t stop her.” 

The door closes, and J.B. returns to her seat at the table, plopping into it with more finesse than usual. She has not touched her own birthday cake. 

“So,” she says. 

“So,” Jughead echoes. 

“So,” J.B. repeats. “Jug? Can I borrow some money?” 

He blinks. 

“See,” she continues, rushing as though she knows he’s not going to like whatever she’s about to propose, “I figured it out. I finally figured out what I want to do, and I just—well, I have to take some classes. And I’m going to be paying more in rent at Aiden’s. But if I start taking classes then I can’t exactly increase my hours at the bar, you know?” 

Jughead slides his gaze sideways onto his mother, who contributes to the conversation by standing up and walking away from it, silently collecting the dirty plates. 

He fails to see why J.B. can’t pick up more hours; bartenders work _nights_ , after all, and classes are presumably during the day. He fails to see, too, why someone in need of money would purposefully move into a more expensive living situation. But all he says for now is, “What classes?” 

“Well—the first one is more of a retreat, really. A yoga retreat.” 

“A yoga retreat,” Jughead repeats. “I’m sorry, what?” 

“I’m going to be a yoga instructor,” J.B. says, with all the confidence in the world. 

One of the blood vessels in Jughead’s left eyeball begins throbbing. He can feel precisely which blood vessel it is, too. “Since when do you even do yoga?” 

“I’ve been really into it for the last three months. Which you would _know_ , if we ever talked.” 

“You don’t call me either,” he points out. “This is not all on me.” 

“Every time I try to call you, you’re on the phone with Betty.” 

The blood vessel in his eye threatens to erupt. “Bullshit. That’s not how cell phones work, and you know it. I would get a missed call alert.” 

“Well, anyway,” J.B. huffs, crossing her arms over her chest. “I’ll pay you back in a year, after I get my certification.”

  
  


“Oh, my _god_ ,” Betty says. “She just asked you for money? Just like that?” 

Somehow, her mild horror makes perfect sense. The Coopers, he imagines, probably don’t talk openly about money. They wouldn’t need to. 

“Yeah. Well, it’s not the first time.” 

“Have you loaned her money before?” 

He nods. “Not for _yoga teacher school_ , obviously. For textbooks, a couple of times, when she was trying to do the college thing.” 

That hadn’t even been a difficult decision, even in the years when he was barely making ends meet himself. He’d gotten lucky not just with scholarships and grants, but with _support_ , with people willing and able to show him the intangibles of how to go to college. It was the kind of knowledge that nice middle-class kids like Betty and Archie simply absorbed from thin air over the family dinner table, and it was knowledge he’d tried to pass on to his sister; clearly, he’d failed. 

Betty raises an eyebrow. “Did she ever pay you back?” 

“Of course not. Nor did I expect her to. But…” He lets out a long, frustrated sigh. 

“Textbooks for real school are different,” Betty agrees. “So…uh…” 

“I’m not loaning her money for yoga teacher school,” he says, leaving out all his rationale besides the fact that it’s ridiculous, like that his workplace might close without warning, or that a significant portion of his previously disposable income is now reserved for plane tickets to Albany. “She can figure this one out on her own.” 

“And how long has she been dating this guy?” Her voice is hesitant but steady, the kind of voice she’d use to announce she was about to rip off a particularly sticky Band-Aid. 

Jughead swallows. “I don’t know. She says a couple of months, but that might be a lie. It might be less.” 

A pensive look appears on Betty’s face, but whatever thoughts are running through her mind remain unspoken. 

It’s not the same, though. He doesn’t know _exactly_ where this Aiden fellow lives, but J.B. is moving no more than ten miles. She’ll probably leave half her stuff in their mother’s apartment anyway, and she’ll probably be back there within the calendar year.

  
  


J.B. _does_ try to call him a couple of days later, but Jughead doesn’t answer. He’s already on the phone—or, rather, on FaceTime with Archie and Fred, who’ve taken to contacting Jughead once a week or so, propping up Archie’s laptop in front of the baby as though little Triple-A is an interesting conversationalist. He is not, but Jughead finds he looks forward to the calls anyway. Frustrating though Archie occasionally was in their childhood (and still is, sometimes), there’s something to be said for slowly catching up with your oldest friend. 

“He slept five hours in a row last night,” Archie says proudly. “First time. _And_ I think he’s learning to smile for real. Are you going to show Uncle Jug, Auggie?” 

“ _Uncle_ Jug?” 

Archie’s eyebrows knit together; the slight change in angle illuminates both the bags under his eyes and what looks like about three days of reddish stubble on his chin. “Sorry. I won’t—” 

“It’s fine,” Jughead says. “‘Uncle Jug’ just sounds like—I don’t know. Like a crotchety cartoon mountain man or something.” 

Before Archie can respond, the baby lets loose a spectacular and noisy bowel movement. “Oh, god,” Archie says, a harrowed look coming into his eyes as August begins wailing. “That’s like the sixth one today. Okay. It’s okay, buddy, Daddy’s got it.” He sweeps the baby off to change him, and Jughead’s left alone with Fred, who squints into the computer’s camera through his bifocals, like he’s not sure it’s going to work without Archie there to supervise. 

“You sleeping much, Fred?” 

“Less than before, but I wouldn’t change a thing.” He chuckles a little. 

“Archie seems like he’s enjoying it.” 

He’s had the thought, once or twice, that Archie might just be one of those people whom parenthood improves immensely, that having a tiny version of himself (and Auggie looks _just_ like Archie, truly) might keep Archie from wondering so much about his own what-ifs and help him focus on the future. 

“He’s a little overwhelmed, and so is Brigitte, but that’s normal, you know? Mary and I—whew, when Archie was born, I didn’t think we were going to survive the first six months, and we had both sets of our parents to lend a hand.” 

“How is Mary?” 

“She’s great. Coming back at the end of the month, I think.” Fred sighs, and though it’s hard to tell between the image quality and his glasses, Jughead thinks his eyes might be getting a bit misty. “She’s mentioned retiring in the next few years. Here’s hoping she might decide to retire back in Riverdale.” 

A question, vague and unformed, swirls in Jughead’s mind. It feels like fog, rising from a country road before the sun comes up: solid enough to see, but intangible enough that grabbing onto it, shaping it into words, is impossible. 

“You and Mary,” he says, and that’s as much as he can get out. 

“Oh, I try not to imagine anything happening, Jug.” Fred’s voice carries the tiniest bit of sadness. “Best not to.” 

There’s a pause, just long enough to be uncomfortable, and then—mercifully—Archie reappears with the baby. 

“Auggie’s all clean,” he announces. “What have you guys been talking about?” 

“So where’s Brigitte today?” Jughead asks, and a puzzled look crosses Archie’s face. 

“She’s with Betty. They’re having some girl time. I thought you—”

A thoroughly involuntary scowl crosses Jughead’s face. He can feel it, and he wishes it would go away. “Betty and I don’t keep tabs on each other’s whereabouts.” 

“No, of course not,” Archie says quickly, just as Auggie breaks the tension further by spitting a truly massive amount of white goo all over himself and his father. “Oh, gross. Come on, Auggie, I _just_ changed you.” 

Fred waits for Archie to vanish again before leaning a little closer to the computer screen. “Betty misses you, you know.” 

“I miss her too.” 

Nodding, Fred rubs a hand over the familiar stubble on his chin, then sighs deeply. “I don’t know what to tell you, Jughead, I really don’t. Mary and I always loved each other—still do—but we could never make that love work in the same place.” He pauses for a moment, clearly weighing his next words. “I really hope that’s not the case for you and Betty.” 

A lump forms in the back of Jughead’s throat, so unyielding that when he tries to swallow it down, he almost gags.

  
  


He writes a full three thousand words that afternoon, fingers clacking furiously over his keys as though possessed. Betty FaceTimes him early that evening—prettier than ever, he thinks, though he can’t discern any particular changes in her since yesterday. 

“Some flowers mysteriously appeared on my doorstep while I was out today,” she tells him, green eyes twinkling as she reaches to her right and pulls a bright bouquet in a vase into view. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?” 

“Nope.” He wishes he could reach into the computer screen and pull Betty through, but settles for winking at her instead. Two more weeks, he tells himself; two more weeks, and she’ll be in his arms again. “Not one single thing.”

  
  


A waxed paper bag hits Jughead’s desk, and he looks up to see all five-foot-nothing of Toni standing over him, arms crossed over her chest, eyebrow raised. 

“This a bribe?” he wonders aloud. 

Toni’s eyebrow goes up even further. “I can’t bring you donuts without it being a bribe?” 

“No,” he says, because she never has before. The last time Toni brought him donuts, she wanted him to housesit; the time before that, she’d been trying to convince him to let her write a particular feature; the time before _that_ , she’d been trying to set him up with one of her college friends. 

They both know how this is likely to end: he’ll eat the donuts, but figure out a way not to do the thing she wants him to do. 

(He _had_ watered her plants and fed her cat for that one week, and he’d managed to keep everything alive—not even the orchid perished under his watch.) 

She grins. “Fair enough. It’s a bribe.” 

“For what?” 

“Making sure I meet your girl this time.” 

He sighs, more for the show of annoyance than because he’s actually annoyed. “I promise I’ll introduce you to Betty this time,” he says. 

“You’d better. I know where you live, Jones. Don’t think I won’t invite myself if you forget to do it. I’ve been _dying_ to watch you shoot yourself in the foot.” 

“Yeah, yeah,” he mutters, waving her off. 

After she’s gone, he opens the bag… and immediately sends off an email from his personal account that reads, simply, _Goddamnit, Toni_. 

She’s brought him donuts from that horrible brunch spot with the avocado toast. 

_What?_ comes the near-immediate reply. _You complaining about the ginger rhubarb or the lemon zest pistachio?_

 _Both_ , he writes back. 

His email dings again almost immediately. He knows, without looking, that it will be Toni with a pointed _You ate them anyway, didn’t you?_ And while he is, in fact, already halfway through the lemon zest pistachio, he— 

The email is not from Toni. It’s his job search alert.

It’s… a _possibility_.

  
  


After they’ve loaded the last of the boxes J.B.’s taking with her into Aiden’s car, Jughead climbs the three flights of stairs up to his mom’s apartment and takes a look at the newly abandoned bedroom. He could’ve sworn he’d carried hundreds of pounds of stuff down the stairs—suitcases of clothes, _boxes_ of clothes, and of course, most of J.B.’s vinyl collection—but the bedroom still seems to be more than half full. 

His mother joins him in the doorway. “Pizza’s ordered,” she tells him. “Thanks for helping, Jug.” 

Like he’d let his mother drag a third of J.B.’s boxes down three flights of stairs. “Yeah, no problem.” 

In the kitchen, she twists the caps off two bottles of soda and passes one to him. They sit in silence for a while; it’s a comfortable silence, he thinks. With a sharp, sudden stab of anger at himself, Jughead suddenly realizes he can’t remember the last time he saw his mother without his sister around. 

How did he let things get like _this_ , he wonders? And why had it taken him so long to notice that they were like this? 

Gladys clears her throat slightly, jolting him back to attention. “Is Betty still coming next week?” 

He nods. 

“You taking time off?” 

“I can’t,” he says. “We’ll probably go to Chicago or Columbus or something for a couple of days while she’s here, though. I’ll have the weekend off.” 

His mother nods absently. Holding the neck of the bottle between two fingers, she twirls the green glass in a small circle on the tabletop. 

“You have your own life to live, Jughead,” she says. “You don’t have to stay here just because that’s where we are.” 

The same lump he’d felt while talking to Fred Andrews returns, and all the pizza he swallows serves only to push it into the pit of his stomach instead.

  
  


  
  


(to be continued…)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to village-skeptic and heartunsettledsoul for looking over this. 
> 
> As always - comments are wonderful!


	11. Chapter 11

  
  


“So, favorite cousin.” Carmine lips pause over the edge of a ruby-red goblet containing crimson sangria. “Has our Forsythe asked for your assistance in decamping from his undoubtedly humble abode and entrenching himself once more on our fine river shores?” 

“What?” Betty snaps, though of course her brain, long since used to Cheryl’s manner of speech, has already translated everything into plain English. “No.” 

Cheryl arches an eyebrow. “Really?” 

“We’ve talked about one of us moving eventually, sure.”

“Sooner rather than later, I’m assuming.” 

“We don’t have a timeline,” Betty sighs. “I’m just going to see him.” 

As if to further blanken her already imperturbable expression, Cheryl slides a pair of vermillion-framed sunglasses onto her face. “Well,” she says, “that’s a surprise.” 

On most days, Betty would brush off her cousin’s somewhat dismissive remarks without a second thought. On many days, she would welcome the invitation to discuss her relationship, to challenge Cheryl on those remarks. 

Today, though—a day on which she has spent hours trapped at Thornhill giving Cheryl advice on subjects in which Betty is not anything close to resembling an expert—she has to fight hard not to lose her cool entirely. Sure, she had a few opinions on how the Blossom Maple Farms nonprofit might want to structure the after-school programs that will make up the bulk of the nonprofit’s activities. But when Cheryl started hinting she wanted Betty’s input on hiring a managing director for the nonprofit as a whole, she’d put her foot firmly down. 

( _Hiring a managing director_. Like she knows the first thing about human resources.) 

She rolls a maraschino cherry around on her tongue while she tries, unsuccessfully, to wash down annoyance with her own sangria. Something nearly gets stuck in her throat, and it takes Betty a moment to realize that what’s threatening to stick is literal instead of metaphorical: not a manifestation of anxiety, but a piece of well-chilled fruit. 

“Is sangria supposed to have cherries in it?” she wonders aloud, once she’s chewed and swallowed the offending item. 

Predictably, Cheryl does not deign to respond. “Be a dear and take the working charter and bylaws with you, Elizabeth,” she says instead. “Review them on your so-called vacation. Ask that hobo of yours for input, when the two of you get tired of making eyes at each other.” 

“You want Jughead to review your nonprofit’s documents?” 

“He’s supposed to have a way with words, isn’t he?” Cheryl waves a hand, as if to dismiss the very idea she herself has just put forward. “And he grew up on that side of the tracks. Perhaps he’ll have a unique and valuable insight.”

  
  


By the time Betty leaves for the airport on the following Friday, she’s long since gotten herself cool, calm, and collected. Nerves of steel wrapped in a pink t-shirt and denim cutoff shorts, that’s her. The fact that she lives almost seven hundred miles from her boyfriend remains a problem, but it’s not an earth-shattering, life-defining, insurmountable problem. The problem is manageable, for now, and a solution to it exists. She simply has to find said solution. 

So what if she had cried on and off in frustration for two days the week after Jughead left, when she’d suddenly seen their fight from his point of view, and realized how selfish she had been to insinuate that his established life was more easily given up than hers? The selfishness hadn’t been intentional on her part, and she still thinks her instincts were correct; Jughead _would_ be happier in Riverdale than she would be in Toledo. But she’d made the insinuation nonetheless, and it was cruel in a way she doesn’t like to admit she can be. She’d cried on and off for _another_ two days when she thought about how Jughead had spared her feelings by not pointing as much out. 

Betty has a plan for this trip to Toledo. She has a hidden agenda. A _mission_. She wants to show Jughead—not just tell him, but show him—that he means more to her than that one particular callous remark implies. 

She stands in line to board the early-morning flight with an overpriced airport iced mocha in one hand and her boarding pass in the other. Her motorcycle helmet is strapped to her back, secure in its bag, and in the oversized purse that serves as her carry-on, tucked in with Cheryl’s nonprofit documents, is a printed copy of the Ohio Department of Education’s out of state teaching licensure requirements. 

Sweat from the iced mocha drips onto her bare leg, and she wonders if—no, she corrects herself, _when_ —she’ll tell Jughead that she’s considering it. She’s considering moving to Ohio.

  
  


She bumps along in the back of a shuttle van from the Detroit airport, staring out the window at the passing scenery. All of it, she thinks, seems uninspiring. 

But maybe that’s not a fair assessment. After all, they’re on an interstate. What interstate has truly inspiring views? 

And, after all—she wouldn’t be living on the interstate between Detroit and Toledo. 

As the suburbs slowly come into view, she can’t help but feel that they’re not very inspiring either. But then, again, what suburbs are? 

Once she’s reached the endpoint of her shuttle ride—the Toledo airport, not big enough to be worth flying into—she orders an Uber to Jughead’s apartment. From the backseat of the white Nissan Altima that arrives a few minutes later, she watches Toledo proper go by. In its mix of older brick buildings and newer strip malls, it’s… well, it’s not _that_ different than Riverdale. There’s more of it, to be sure, but in some ways, it still seems to have the small town feel she’s decided she prefers to the big city. She’s read Yelp reviews and checked websites, but what she really needs is for Jughead to show her around a bit more, to introduce her to what he likes about Toledo, to take her where they hadn’t been able to go over her brief Thanksgiving visit. 

Maybe a small city would be a good mix between what she likes about New York and what she likes about Riverdale. 

Maybe. 

She finds the key Jughead hid under his welcome mat and lets herself into his apartment, checking the time on her phone before she opens the door. 3:34. He’ll be home around six, he’s said. 

Inside the freshly tidied apartment, she finds a nice bouquet of flowers in a cheap vase on the coffee table. Beside the vase is a little note that reads _don’t you dare start cooking_.

  
  


She’s dozing on the couch when she hears a key turn in the lock; by the time she’s sat up and given a cursory fluff to her disheveled hair, Jughead’s made it all the way inside the door. 

He pauses with his hand still clutching the doorknob and watches her stretch. 

“Hi,” she says. 

“Hi,” Jughead echoes, his gaze fixed on her. In it, she thinks she reads a simple desire: he wants to come home to this, always. 

She thinks that’s what’s he’s thinking. 

She _wants_ to think that’s what he’s thinking. 

It’s what _she_ wants.

  
  


“You didn’t have to come home from work and cook me dinner,” she says, as they sit down to what Jughead has proclaimed to be the apotheosis of his culinary skills: baked salmon. “We could have just gone out. I know you don’t like cooking.” 

He spoons green beans onto her plate—fresh ones, not canned or frozen, though she knows he bought them pre-trimmed—and says, simply, “I like cooking for you.” 

_Tell him now_ flashes through Betty’s mind, unbidden. _Now, before you have a chance to overthink it even more than you already have._

“Did you not want wine?” she hears, and realizes only then that a glass of chilled white now sits in front of her. She’s one hundred percent certain Jughead did not own wine glasses when she was here for Thanksgiving, and for half a breath, Betty fears that she might cry under the weight of both how much and how easily he always seems to _try_ for her. 

“Wine is great,” she says, automatically. “Juggie?” 

He takes the seat across from her, and Betty reaches for him, linking their fingers together over the tabletop. 

“I need you to know something.” 

As she begins apologizing for the things she’d said in Riverdale, for the assumptions she’d made, Jughead’s fingers tighten over hers. It’s enough to keep her going, even as the little voice in the back of her mind keeps up its refrain: _you chose Riverdale_ , it says. _You made the life you wanted_. 

“I’m happy in Riverdale, Jug. I am. But…” She takes a deep breath. “If you think you’d be happier here, then I’ll think about it. I mean, I _am_ thinking about it.” 

He clutches her hand so hard she thinks it might break. 

“Betty…” He swallows once, and Betty holds her tongue, but all he has to add is “Thank you.” 

“I love you,” she says, not for the first time since she started her speech. Will she ever be able to say it enough? 

Jughead cracks the tiniest of smiles. “I know.” He releases his grip ever so slightly, and rubs a thumb over her knuckle. “I never doubted that.” 

And even though a very large part of Betty would rather forego the baked salmon and head straight to the bedroom, her stomach chooses that moment to remind her that she’d been too anxious to eat properly for most of the day. 

The salmon is better than she expected. But then, she supposes, everything tastes better when it’s made by someone who loves you.

  
  


They fall asleep tangled in each other. Betty wakes up around three in the morning with pins and needles running up and down the entire right side of her body. Moving into what is theoretically a more comfortable position than the one she’d just abandoned serves only to jolt her further awake. 

Once she’s sure she can stand on her tingling leg, she gets up to use the bathroom. On the way there, she stops at Jughead’s bedroom window, peeking through the cheap tin blinds into the parking lot below. 

The view is, once again, thoroughly uninspiring. But… she already knew what Jughead’s bedroom overlooked. And what else could she have expected from a parking lot? 

Besides, she thinks, when she returns to bed—they could find a house with a yard. That yard wouldn’t border Fox Forest, wouldn’t have a ten-minute hike to the river she finds so centering. But it would probably at least have deer that come to visit in the middle of the night. 

They definitely wouldn’t stay in this apartment.

  
  


On Saturday, they stay in the apartment. It’s not so bad. In fact, it’s very good. 

Late in the afternoon, when all their itches have been at least temporarily scratched, she pulls out her laptop (to read Jughead the latest rewrite of her draft), and with it, the materials given to her by Cheryl. 

“Ugh,” she groans, throwing the packet on Jughead’s coffee table. “I forgot those were packed in here.” 

Jughead runs a finger cautiously over the edge of the pile, like he’s not sure he’s allowed to touch anything. “These are for Cheryl’s nonprofit?” 

“Yeah. She asked me to review them while I’m here. She asked if _you’d_ review them while I’m here, actually.”

“Cheryl wants my opinion on…” His eyes skim over the top of the pile. 

“All of it, I think,” Betty says. “But don’t feel obligated. It’s not like she’s paying you to do any work.” 

“She’s not paying you, either, I assume.” He picks up the stack. “It’s okay. I’m interested, actually.” 

Much to Betty’s surprise, he quickly becomes lost in the documents, even grabbing a pen to scrawl notes in the margins. She opens her laptop and positions herself at the other end of the couch, stuffing the lone, flat throw pillow between her back and the arm so that she can put her feet in Jughead’s lap. 

He reads on, one hand idly rubbing her ankle, until Betty gets euphemistically itchy again and pokes him in the side with her big toe.

  
  


“Ready to enter the belly of the beast?” 

Betty removes her motorcycle helmet and squints at her boyfriend before shaking out her hair. “You’re being a little overdramatic, Jug, don’t you think? It’s just Sunday brunch with Toni.” 

_Just Sunday brunch with Toni_ , she repeats to herself. She’s not nervous about meeting Jughead’s sort-of-but-not-really-ex-girlfriend. Jughead’s said he doesn’t consider her an ex, and Betty agrees with that assessment; once you’re out of middle school, anything lasting less than twenty-four hours doesn’t even really register as a fling. 

But Toni is still his closest friend here, and for that reason and that reason alone, Betty wants Toni to like her. 

Though it’s true that she’s still never managed to shake her thoroughly ingrained need to make a good first impression. And she wants to like Toni, too—not just for Jughead’s sake, but for hers, if she ends up moving here. _If_ she moves, it would be nice to already have a friend, of sorts. 

(J.B., she knows, will not fulfill any part of that need.) 

Still, as they’d gotten dressed that morning, _Jughead_ had been the unusually fidgety one; she knows he doesn’t need Toni’s approval, but he’s clearly more nervous about the two of them finally meeting than he wants to admit.

“I’m actually not.” With a chuckle, he jerks his head towards the old brick building across the street. “That’s the name of the restaurant.” 

Sure enough, what Betty had initially taken as a collection of scrap metal bolted to artfully rotting bricks is—well, it’s exactly that. But the collection of scrap metal has letters on it, she sees now, and those letters do spell out _The Belly of the Beast_. 

“Oh, god,” she says. “It’s the industrial-chic version of a serial killer’s note.” 

“I hate everything about this restaurant,” Jughead says, his voice so close to cheerful that Betty suspects he in fact loves everything about this restaurant, just because it gives him something to complain about.

  
  


They walk through the front doors of the restaurant; Jughead doesn’t stop at the hostess station, but walks straight through to the patio, where they find picnic tables that are, to Betty’s slight dismay, fitted with backless benches. At one of the tables sits a pretty, petite woman with ombre pink hair; though she’s wearing about three more layers of clothing than is appropriate for the current temperature, her outfit still somehow manages to register as skimpy. 

She is simultaneously exactly and nothing at all like Betty expected. 

“So.” Toni does not stand up; she merely arches an eyebrow in a way that almost reminds Betty of Veronica Lodge. “Finally. The gal who stole Jughead’s heart.” 

Before Betty can determine whether or not that’s meant to be insulting, Jughead scoffs. “She didn’t _steal_ it. I gave it freely.” 

He clambers into one of the benches, all long legs and knees and elbows as he tries to get situated, and then extends a hand to help Betty onto the bench next to him. The helping hand is really more of a hindrance, and she’d normally smile at the gesture and climb over without accepting it, but today she takes his hand and lets him pull her close. He puts an arm around her shoulder once she’s situated, and she leans into him in return, sliding the hand that’s closest to him across his thigh. 

Across the table, the Veronica-like eyebrow achieves increasingly Veronica-like heights. 

“The avocado toast is good here,” Toni says, a little too casually. 

Betty answers without thinking. “I’d hope so. How hard can it be to get that right?” 

She continues to peruse the menu—it’s the kind of place she very, very occasionally misses from her New York days, all cornflake-crusted French toast and minted berry compotes and, yes, avocado toast. She quickly decides on a spinach and goat cheese omelette and home fries, and sets the menu down to find Toni propping her chin in her hands with her elbows on the table, a look of studied cool contemplation on her face. Overly studied, in Betty’s opinion. 

“Jughead,” Toni drawls, “you didn’t tell me she was _funny_.”

  
  


“So,” he says, once they’re back at his apartment. “Did you like her?” 

An answer wholly in the affirmative won’t come to her, not yet. After one brunch, Toni seems to her like like a weird mirror image of Jughead. The crispy shell of sarcasm and snark is there—but whether or not Toni’s outer layer also surrounds a gooey marshmallow interior and fiercely beating heart, she can’t quite tell. 

“I think so,” Betty says. “I’d like to get to know her better. Do you think she liked me?” 

Jughead holds up his phone, open to two texts from Toni. _She’s not my type, but you do you_ , and then, immediately following, _Don’t fuck this up, Jones._

“That’s as close as we’ll get to a blessing.” His voice carries its characteristic dryness, but Betty can tell he’s relieved to have something approaching approval from both of them, and she notices he sits a little straighter for the rest of the day.

  
  


On Monday morning, after Jughead leaves for work, she maps an address in her phone, repeats the walking directions to herself until she’s memorized them, and heads out, Jughead’s spare keys tucked safely in her purse. The distance between his apartment and her destination is approximately twelve blocks—a short walk, but a miserable one, thanks to humidity so thick she thinks she could cut the air with a knife. No sweat evaporates from her skin, and she’s drenched by the time she arrives in front of the old, beige, cinderblock complex. 

Betty removes her sunglasses, wipes her eyes on her t-shirt sleeve, and drops the sunglasses back into place. 

There are eight public high schools in Toledo. She wouldn’t necessarily work at this one. She wouldn’t even have to work at a public high school; there are plenty of private ones here, too. 

(In fact, she reminds herself, she ought to look into those. The salaries are probably higher.)

The outside of the high school is just so _depressing_. 

It hasn’t even been a week since she trod the faded linoleum floors of Riverdale High, and yet, she already aches for her permanently outdated, relentlessly dusty classroom.

  
  


On Tuesday, she walks to the nearest coffee shop and plants herself there for the morning, keeping a chat open with Jughead on her computer so she can send him ideas for the trip they’ll take this weekend. 

_I trust you_ , he writes back, and she spends too much money booking a very nice hotel room in Chicago. 

At lunchtime, she takes an Uber to his office. 

“There’s not a ton to see,” Jughead says, when she demands a full tour. 

He’s right; there isn’t. The offices are smallish, the decor is surprisingly drab considering half the paper is advertisements for adult stores, and Jughead’s desk is in a cubicle in the dimmest-lit corner of the dreaded open floor plan (though she suspects that this last bit is, in fact, his preference). Most of the staff seems to be gone for lunch, but he introduces her around, sliding an arm around her hips every time he utters the words _my girlfriend, Betty_. 

As they’re half in, half out of the break room, Toni stomps up behind them, her combat boots making even her light footsteps echo on the linoleum tile. “Get a room, Jug,” she says, elbowing him in the ribs as she pushes past the two of them. 

“She means well,” he tells Betty as they’re walking to lunch; it’s only then she realizes she must be scowling. “At least, I think she does.” 

“Would she tell you if she had a problem with me?” 

“Undoubtedly, if her track record on all other facets of my life is anything to go by.” They’re already holding hands; now he gives her fingers a little squeeze. “You should hear what she had to say about this shirt.”

“What’s wrong with your shirt?” It’s a perfectly nice shirt—a linen blend, a little snug across his shoulders and over his biceps, and just the right shade of blue. She’s wanted to rip it off him ever since she saw him put it on this morning. 

“She doesn’t believe in short-sleeved button-downs, on principle. I think…” 

He doesn’t finish the sentence. Betty waits for as long as she can bear it, which is only about thirty seconds, before prompting, “Juggie?” 

Jughead’s head jerks up slightly, as though startled—as though, in that brief half-minute, he’s gotten more lost in thought than he intended. 

“I think the entire time I’ve known Toni, up to now, I haven’t been very happy,” he says. The corners of his mouth twitch upwards the tiniest bit, and Betty melts for reasons that have nothing to do with the sweltering heat. “I think she’s just having some cognitive dissonance. You know?” 

He takes her to his favorite local burger stand. It’s fine. It’s acceptable. 

It’s not as good as Pop’s.

  
  


She stays mostly in the apartment for the next couple of days, taking advantage of the time alone to catch up on sleep she probably wasn’t missing and to polish up the second-to-last chapter of the second draft of her novel. Her query letter is drafted; her carefully curated list of agents waits in a folder on her personal cloud. Soon, she knows—soon, the time will come. 

They’re cuddling on the couch after dinner on Thursday night when Jughead’s phone rings. The first time, he hits the button to mute it without looking at the number, but when it rings a second time, he checks the screen and quietly mutters, “Shit.” 

Betty sits up. “What is it?” 

“I have to take this,” he says, swiping to answer with a quick, almost eager, “Hello?” He’s down the hallway and into the bedroom almost before she knows it, pulling the door half-closed behind him. 

What on earth, she wonders, does he not want her to overhear? The way he’d looked at his phone, too—he’d held the screen so she couldn’t see the number, she realizes. She won’t listen at the door, but if she stays quiet, she can make out most Jughead’s end of the conversation anyway. 

“Yes, I received the information, and I’ve looked it over.” A pause. “I do have some suggestions for improvement, I—at the end of July? Yes, that’s fine.” There’s another pause, a longer one this time, and then he says, “Because that would have been unprofessional.”

 _Work_ , Betty figures, shrugging to herself. It must be something to do with work. Though, still, why she’s not allowed to listen in… 

“ _Yes_ , I know the difference between networking and nepotism.” 

He returns to her a few minutes later, dropping onto the couch with a restlessness so pronounced that he bounces up again within seconds. 

“Jug, what was that about?” 

“Just a work thing.” His hand twitches over his thigh, tapping out an all-too-familiar rhythm which, a moment later, her brain helpfully translates into musical notes: the old Blossom Maple Farms radio jingle. “Want to go get ice cream?” 

Betty doesn’t, but she nods anyway. 

They stand in line at what Jughead proclaims to be his favorite of Toledo’s local ice cream emporiums, Mr. Freeze: cash only, Jughead informs her with something approaching pride, and unbeatable portion sizes. 

With some dismay, she notes that Mr. Freeze doesn’t seem to offer any seating. 

They stand in the parking lot with her strawberry soft serve cone and his Buckeye sundae (which she obligingly tastes, despite having never particularly enjoyed the combination of chocolate and peanut butter), watching the crowds of people doing exactly the same thing: groups of teenagers, older couples, families. Jughead’s watching them too, she notices, especially the teenagers. 

“My mom used to bring us here, that first summer we moved,” he says. “We could walk from the first apartment we lived in. I hated it then.”

“Really? It’s good ice cream.” She takes a lick of her cone. “I guess you wanted a booth to park yourself in with your laptop.” 

“Hangout spots suck when you’re seventeen and the only people you know are your mom and your little sister,” he says. “I wanted _you_ here, and Archie. Hell, even Veronica or Dilton Doiley.” 

A fresh flood of sadness washes over Betty—not an active, painful sadness, but the nostalgic kind. The wave carries with it memories of Pop’s after Jughead left, of Archie and Veronica on one side of a red vinyl booth and herself alone on the other. It had been a very _particular_ sadness, one she could never fully articulate at the time, no matter how thoroughly she’d explored it in her diary: the opportunities she hadn’t taken, the _best_ best friend she no longer had by her side, the swirl of stubborn refusal to admit that with Jughead gone, she sometimes felt like a third wheel, spinning uselessly on Archie and Veronica’s dates. 

“Betty?” 

She looks up to see Jughead handing her a napkin.

“Your ice cream’s melting.” 

After licking a pink drop from her finger, she tilts the cone in his direction. “You want to finish it? I’m full.” 

He looks somewhat longingly at what remains, but shakes his head. 

“I’m good,” he says.

  
  


On Friday night, they drive to Chicago. Even after the sun goes down, even with the wind whipping over her entire body, four hours hunched on the back of Jughead’s motorcycle in a helmet and a Kevlar jacket borrowed from Toni has Betty sweaty and miserable by the time they arrive at their hotel. 

“I’m going to shower,” she says, once they’ve made it to their room. Jughead nods absently. 

Betty spends a long time under the water, cycling the temperature from cold to warm and back again, then blow-dries her hair before slipping into the simple emerald chemise she’d bought just for this weekend. Just for _him_. 

Maybe she shouldn’t have bought new lingerie. Maybe she shouldn’t be treating every visit as a special occasion. This, though—this is their first vacation together, such as it is. A weekend in Chicago isn’t the most romantic getaway in the world, but it’s what they have for now. 

(Besides, she knows how much he likes her in this particular shade of green.) 

The silk adheres to her skin in the bathroom’s humidity, and although she knows Jughead won’t care (or, for that matter, even notice), she can’t help but frown a little at the imperfections reflected in the bathroom mirror. Opening the bathroom door, she shivers a little at the sudden onslaught of air conditioning, then pulls a brush through her hair one last time and leaves the bathroom. 

Through the sliding glass door, she spots Jughead on their small private balcony, stripped down to undershirt and jeans. He leans on his elbows on the railing, a canned soda from the hotel vending machine in hand. A second soda, this one diet, sweats on the balcony table. 

“Hey,” she says softly, opening the sliding door and stepping onto the grimy balcony floor in her bare feet. Outside, the air is warm but pleasant against her exposed skin. Jughead makes a low hum of appreciation at her nightgown as she insinuates herself between him and the balcony. 

He plucks lightly at one of the shoulder straps, and she shivers again.

She turns her head to look back at him when he doesn’t immediately wrap his arms around her. “It’s nice out, isn’t it?”

“You’re clean,” he says in response to the unasked question. “I’m still gross.” 

Betty reaches for his hands, tugging one around each side of her waist until his chest and stomach and hips press flat against her back, a reversal of their position on the motorcycle. 

“I don’t care.” 

In fact, she’s enjoying the contrasts: the stickiness of his skin against hers, the tang of his sweat cutting through the rapidly evaporating traces of the hotel’s cucumber-mint body wash, and when she twists to kiss him, the feeling of his oily, still-damp hair under her clean, soft fingertips. 

After they end the kiss, Jughead pulls back, studying her face intently, like it’s changed somehow since the last time he looked. 

“What is it?” 

“Just…” He shakes his head, huffing out the tiniest of breaths. “Don’t give up on me, Betty. Okay?” 

Betty blinks, puzzled. “Give up on you?” she repeats. “Are you afraid I will?” 

Jughead pulls her back into his arms, ducking slightly to rest his chin on her shoulder. He nuzzles a kiss into her clean hair, and she thinks she hears him sigh—with happiness, she hopes. Or contentment. But she can’t quite tell. 

“No,” he says, at long last. “No, I’m not.” 

Together, they watch the lights of Chicago bounce and reflect on the dark ripples of Lake Michigan.

  
  


Something coiled and restless inside Betty pulls her awake just before dawn. Not wanting to disturb Jughead, who’s snoring lightly with his back to her, she slips out of bed and over to the sliding doors as quietly as possible. She’s always been an early riser— through sheer force of habit more than anything else— but being up in time to watch the sunrise without the benefit of her alarm clock is unusual for her. As she stands at the sliding doors, lifting the edge of the curtains just enough to peer through and see the lake, she wishes vaguely for coffee.

Betty can’t remember the last time she got up just to watch the dawn break. 

By now, the sun will have been up over Riverdale for a while. She looks east over the lake, towards home. 

Toledo is also east of here, she knows. And then there are all the points in between: Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Erie. Syracuse and Ithaca, as the crow flies. Buffalo, if you stick to the interstates. 

Her ex-boyfriend from grad school, the one who broke up with her when he’d realized she was deadly serious about claiming the Riverdale High English job as her own, is in Buffalo, still. That man had loved her, or claimed to—but not _enough_. But then, she hadn’t loved him enough either. 

There’s nothing spectacular about this particular sunrise. The sky simply lightens incrementally until it’s so bright Betty has to step back, blinking, and drop the curtain back into place. 

“Everything okay, Betts?”

Jughead’s propped up on one elbow, staring intently at her through sleepy eyes and his mop of hair.

She nods, crosses the room, and climbs back into bed with him.

  
  


It haunts her, though: through the rest of their weekend in Chicago, through the dinner with Gladys and J.B. once they’re back in Toledo, through her long journey back to Riverdale, and through the weeks afterwards. 

_Don’t give up on me, Betty_. 

She still hasn’t figured out what there is to give up on. 

She’s started wondering if she needs to say the same thing to _him_. 

Because no matter how many volunteer opportunities and fun new restaurants she looks up, no matter how much time she spends virtually touring open houses on Zillow or composing unsolicited cover letters for private high schools that are not explicitly hiring English teachers— 

No matter how much she _wants_ to like Toledo, she simply does not. 

She suspects Jughead realized as much, and probably before she did.

  
  


Betty’s twenty-ninth birthday arrives with the usual stifling mid-July heat, another three entries in her rapidly growing pile of politely worded rejection emails, and the unfortunate truth that a young adult murder mystery is a harder sell than she’d envisioned. 

“There’s nothing _graphic_ in it,” she complains to Jughead via FaceTime, the conversation having turned this way even though she’d meant to simply thank him for the gifts that had shown up at her door that morning: flowers, which she’d more or less been expecting, and a pair of earrings to match the necklace he gave her for Christmas, which she hadn’t been. “Look at what happens in TV shows, and movies, and video games. My students eat all of that up with a spoon, and they seem fine. What makes this any worse?” 

“I wish I had an answer to give you,” he says, brow slightly furrowed. “It’ll find a publisher, though, Betts. It’s too good not to.” 

“I hope so.” She stares at her screen, at the pixels making up his face, and it feels like she’s looking at the distance between them. 

He’s clearly about to say something else when Betty’s front door bangs open with the full gale force of a Category 5 hurricane. Both of them jump. 

“Are you decent, dear cousin?” comes Cheryl’s voice, followed a moment later by Cheryl herself. “Ready for our day of birthday celebrations?” She plucks the phone right out of Betty’s hands, raises a sculpted auburn eyebrow, and adds, “Well, _hello_ , Forsythe,” in a voice that’s almost flirtatious. 

“Cheryl,” he says. 

“Couldn’t make the journey to celebrate our gal this weekend, hmm?” 

“We’re not all made of money, Cheryl,” he sighs. “And we don’t all own our own businesses to give ourselves unlimited paid time off.” 

Betty makes a swipe for her phone, but Cheryl denies her, pulling it close to her chest and thus giving Jughead a remarkably focused view of her cleavage. “I haven’t taken a single day off all summer, as well you know. Not since I began setting up the nonprofit. And I won’t be taking another until we get the damn thing fully staffed.” 

She looks expectantly at Betty, until Betty finally sighs and gives in. She won’t get her phone back until she plays along; _if_ she plays along, perhaps Cheryl will at least aim the camera back at her face. Her cousin knows as well as she does that Jughead will be somewhere between indifferent to and disgusted by the sight before him. 

“How close are you, Cheryl?” 

Not very, Betty knows. Lately, Cheryl’s taken to calling her nearly every night to complain—or inviting her to dinner at Thornhill, or showing up at Betty’s house for after-dinner drinks. What had started as a series of nice social visits has since become somewhat cumbersome. 

“Better this week, thank you for asking,” Cheryl says primly. “I’ve found a wonderful managing director, and she’ll start in two weeks. Just the underlings and peons to go now.” 

“Great,” Betty says. “I’ll get my shoes. Juggie, I’ll talk to you later, okay?” 

“You wouldn’t believe how difficult it is to find a good peon these days,” Cheryl continues, as though either of them had asked. “No one who already lives here is qualified, and no one with the right skill set seems willing to relocate.” 

“Offer them more money,” Betty suggests. 

Cheryl’s eyes narrow slightly. “Farewell, Forsythe. You’ll get your girl back at the end of the day.” She hangs up the phone before either Betty or Jughead can respond, and then says, “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” 

“What?” The question—well, really, the whole conversation—has made Betty’s head start to throb. “Why would I care what you pay your nonprofit staff?” 

Arms folded across her chest, Cheryl taps oxblood talons on a pale, thin arm. “No reason,” she says, at length. “No reason at all.”

  
  


_Sorry, Juggie_ , she texts, as soon as she’s in the passenger seat of Cheryl’s Tesla and her phone has been restored to her. 

_Don’t worry about it, I know how Cheryl is_ , he replies, and then, _Wish I could be there_. 

_Me too_ , she writes back. 

She has no idea when they’ll see each other again.

  
  


Two weeks and three rejection letters later, Betty sits alone in the _Blue and Gold_ , determined to finish her pile of grading before she goes home for the weekend. All these years later, this office is still her favorite place to work. This desk, the one she’d claimed at fifteen when she’d revived the paper and assumed the mantle of editor in chief, still feels more like hers than the one that’s in her house. 

It’s not that she has any _plans_ for said weekend; she doesn’t. It would simply be nice to not have to think about these pop quizzes. 

It would be nice to think a little bit more about the very odd text from her boyfriend that’s been sitting on her phone for the last hour: _How do you feel about grand romantic gestures?_

 _Fine_ , she’d written back, as soon as her students had departed. Jughead has not texted her back since, nor had he picked up when she called him a few minutes later from the faculty lounge while she waited for her pot of coffee to finish brewing. She’d shrugged to herself and put the phone back in her purse, and she’d checked it once again when she first sat down at this desk to start grading, but the lack of response isn’t alarming—or even noteworthy. Probably, she’ll just find flowers on her doorstep when she arrives home. 

She quickly loses herself in the rhythms of grading: a check mark here, a question mark there, a deep sigh when an answer goes totally off base. Short-answer quizzes will be the death of her, she knows, but she simply can’t bring herself to write a multiple-choice English test. 

Check. Check. Question mark. Check. Underline. A deep sigh for Cameron, who clearly did not read past the first ten pages of _Heart of Darkness_. Check…

Footsteps creak past her, but her back is to the door, and she doesn’t bother to look; at five o’clock on a summer Friday, it can’t be anyone other than the custodial staff. 

With a light swish, something gray and blurry whizzes into Betty’s line of vision, landing on her desk with a gentle _thump_. She frowns at the object for half a second before realizing what it is—at which point her heart nearly stops. 

A beanie. An old, gray, familiar beanie with a hole in the seam. 

“Juggie?” she gasps, jumping up from her chair. Sure enough, Jughead stands only a few feet away from her, holding flowers and dressed in the suit he’d worn to Auggie’s christening. 

“Hey, Betty.” 

“Oh, my god,” she hears herself say, and then again, “Oh, my _god_.” 

They kiss, quickly; of course they do. But Jughead doesn’t let the kiss linger. He leads her back to the desk and gestures for her to sit back in her chair, which she does not do. 

“Juggie, what on earth—”

“I had a job interview,” he says, quickly adding “Here, in Riverdale,” as if he’s afraid that wasn’t clear. 

It was, she thinks—but with so little time to process, Betty’s legs give out anyway. Thankfully, the chair is right behind her. 

“Okay,” she says, her heart racing even harder than her knees had just wobbled. “But why didn’t you tell me?” 

“I didn’t want to get your hopes up.” 

He seats himself on the edge of her desk with his usual terrible posture and collects her hands in his. The pads of his thumbs stroke gently over the heels of hers; although her instinct is to ball her hands into fists, Betty keeps her fingers unclenched, her grip loose, until Jughead’s thumbs find the center of her palms. His touch is soft over her scars. Soft, but firm. Reassuring, even, which is a bit of a surprise—but then, she reminds herself, Jughead has been surprising her this whole time. 

“I didn’t want to get _my_ hopes up,” he continues. 

“Who was the interview with?” 

Jughead cocks his head slightly, and with a sudden flash, Betty sees all the pieces fall into place. The documents she’d been asked to bring to Toledo. The phone call she’d overheard. The conversation on her birthday. 

“Cheryl,” she says. 

“Cheryl,” he confirms. “Well—her nonprofit. Cheryl wasn’t running the interview. Although she did stick her head in at one point.” He takes a deep breath. “I applied months ago. I wasn’t sure she’d even see the application, you know?” 

“Did you mention that we were…” She’s not sure how to ask, exactly, and so she leaves the thought hanging. 

“No,” he says, shaking his head. “I figured if Cheryl saw my letter, well—she knows my full name; she’d make the connection anyway. If Cheryl didn’t see it, I wanted to get an interview on my own merits.” 

“Jug…” she sighs, temporarily exasperated even though she fully understands the need to do something, to _earn_ something, on one’s own.

“I know. And I know I should have told you. But what if it didn’t work out, like—what if I never even got an interview? There are so many things that could go wrong. And they still might. This might not work out at all.” He shifts slightly in a way that, for unknown reasons, sends Betty’s heart fluttering. “But then I got to thinking, while I was packing to come here. And you know what I realized?” 

Betty shakes her head slightly, though it doesn’t seem like Jughead particularly requires a response. 

“This is going to sound like a late-night infomercial for a self-help manual,” he says, with the tiniest of chuckles. “But it’s just a dumb mental block. It’s me. I think things aren’t going to work out. And sometimes they don’t. But my track record really isn’t worse than anyone else’s. And especially not when—” 

He swallows hard, once, and hold her hands tighter. 

“Especially not when it’s you,” he concludes. “Betty, when I read your essay, I didn’t think about coming here to see you. I didn’t _have_ to think. I just did it. When you said you didn’t want to just hook up, that you wanted a relationship, I didn’t have to think about that either. I didn’t think before I told you I loved you the first time. And…”

Drawing a slightly shaky breath, he glances around the _Blue and Gold_ office. 

“All those times in high school I wanted to kiss you, and then I _thought_ about it, and talked myself out of it.” 

Betty draws a shaky breath of her own. Her heart is still fluttering, a light but steady pitter-patter in her chest. “Jug—”

“So I think I’ve been thinking too much,” he says wryly. “Betts, I don’t know how this interview is going to pan out, but regardless—I’ve had enough.” 

Tugging her hands closer into his lap, he smiles at her. Though he looks more than a little nervous, Betty’s heart nevertheless stops fluttering and flies right out of her chest, like it’s trying to collide with his. 

“I gave notice before I left,” he says. “At my job. And at my apartment. I have to go back; it’ll take me a few weeks to clear everything out, but—”

A quiet, calming sense of wonder fills the air. 

“Juggie,” she whispers. “You’re moving here?” 

He nods. “I don’t know what I’ll do for work if this one thing doesn’t work out. And I’m _terrified_ of being unemployed and broke. But…” Jughead shrugs, and when his shoulder falls back into place, the whole world seems to align, just as it should. “None of that matters as much as being with you.” 

Betty’s not conscious of getting to her feet. She’s not conscious of Jughead letting go of her hands so he can cup her face with his, nor of the moment she wraps her arms around his back, pressing her palms into his shoulder blades, which are firm and strong under his suit jacket. 

As they kiss, and kiss, and kiss, Betty slowly comes back to herself. Her whole body still thrums with a desire that isn’t entirely sexual. Part of her wants to rip his clothes off and do inappropriate things to him on top of all the desks, but more of her simply wants to hold him close, to _be_ held close, for as long as humanly possible. 

This feeling, she decides, is happiness.

  
  


The idea comes to her while they’re laying in bed that night. 

Betty’s tucked under Jughead’s arm with her head on his chest, warm but not _too_ warm under a light cotton sheet and the breeze from her ceiling fan. Her skin tingles with a pleasant mixture of afterglow and the knowledge that soon, Jughead will move in with her. Soon she won’t have one foot hooked around his leg, holding him close, while the other stands in some uncertain future. She’ll have him, always. 

It feels the tiniest bit selfish, but in the best possible way. She’s allowed to be selfish sometimes, she thinks. And with that thought comes the sudden desire to make their relationship not just always, but _always_. 

She pushes herself up and away from him, although his arm remains draped around her shoulder, and studies his face. 

One corner of his mouth curls up in a little smile. “What?” 

And she almost says it right then: _Let’s get married. Not now, not right away; we’ll give it time. But—_

But no. Her mind rushes ahead, a million miles a minute. If she’s going to propose—and does she really want to do that before he leaves?—then she wants to do it right. Not here, not now, not like this. 

“Let’s go to Pop’s,” she says instead. It’s just past one in the morning, but she could eat. 

“Betty Cooper.” Jughead’s grin spreads to encompass the other corner of his mouth, too. “Have I told you lately that I love you?”

  
  


Maybe, _maybe_ , it needs thinking about. Maybe they shouldn’t even talk about it until he’s officially moved. But maybe, as Jughead had said in the _Blue and Gold_ offices, what’s best for their relationship is _not_ overthinking it. 

Maybe. 

She sits across from him in the booth at Pop’s, the one that had been their usual so many years ago, and contemplates while she picks at her onion rings and Jughead demolishes a cheeseburger. She imagines her mother’s horrified reaction (“I don’t care what century this is, Elizabeth, there are _some_ bits of propriety that will simply never change”) and Archie’s completely baffled one (“Wait… wait, Betty, you did what?”). She imagines Polly and Jason’s twin unfocused smiles and Cheryl’s pointed eye roll. 

But their opinions would be meaningless, of course, and so she tries to imagine the reaction of the man on the other side of the table, the one who’s not lost in thought (as she clearly is), but who’s content to sit in silence with her. 

They’ve never even really talked about marriage. The concept, in the abstract, is probably something they ought to address before she asks him to join her in the specific. 

In the end, it comes down to this: Betty Cooper wants to marry Jughead Jones, and she wants him to know it. He makes her feel important, and special, and _loved_ , and she wants him to feel that way too. That’s why she’s going to propose. 

Well, that, and the fact that she’s impatient.

  
  


Everyone thinks of her as a planner, but Betty’s always been proud of her ability to improvise. She’s good at thinking on her feet. She’s good at making the most of whatever a particular situation throws at her. 

The problem with this particular situation, as she sees it, is this: While she could certainly throw together something meaningful in the next day or so, before Jughead leaves, she won’t be able to do so while the two of them are more or less joined at the hip. Is she supposed to sneak out for supplies while he showers? He doesn’t take very long showers; that’s never been a problem before, and frankly, she didn’t expect it ever would be. 

Then, of course, there’s the fact that Jughead—if he has ever imagined being proposed to, which she would be willing to bet he has not—wouldn’t _want_ an elaborate surprise. A man who’s only recently become willing to celebrate his own birthday is not a man who would want a public proposal. 

But then, there are _her_ feelings to consider, too. And while Betty knows the moment will be special no matter what, she— 

Well, she wants it to be _special_. After all, she only plans to do this once in her life. 

Food, she thinks. This proposal should probably involve food. 

As she’s drifting off to sleep that night, it hits her. 

“Betty?” Jughead murmurs drowsily, as the idea she’s had makes her jolt upright in his arms. 

“Sorry,” she whispers. She plants a little kiss on his jaw. “Go back to sleep.”

  
  


All it takes is a little surreptitious texting to convince Archie to drop by and take Jughead off her hands for a few hours. 

“I just need to finish some work for Monday,” she says apologetically when Archie and August appear in the driveway, a ready excuse that both Jughead and Archie seem to buy.

(Auggie gives her a suspicious look, but then, that’s seemed to be his only expression lately.) 

She bakes cupcakes, and instead of drawing an icing crown as she’d done for his birthday so many years ago, she draws a golden ring. 

It’s a bit much, perhaps. She could just ask, and in fact she’ll have to, since there’s no way she’ll be able to fit a cupcake into her pocket. But—

  
  


“Picnic dinner?” Jughead’s brow wrinkles slightly. “You look awfully dressed up for that.” 

“By the river,” she says. (She is not dressed up; she’s simply put on her nicest jeans, the jewelry Jughead gave her, and eye makeup, which she hadn’t been wearing when he left.) “Come on, it’ll be nice.” 

He shrugs. “Okay.”

  
  


They find a spot by the shores of Sweetwater River, a nice flat grassy area with the river on one side and trees on the other. The air is perfectly fresh and clean, the sun is just beginning to set, and Betty finds she’s so excited that all she can do is pick at the edges of her sandwich. 

“You okay, Betty?” Jughead inquires, through a partially full mouth. If he were the one about to propose, he’d probably have inhaled the entire picnic by now, basket and all. 

“I’m great. I’m just…” She takes a deep breath, and smiles. “I’m excited, that’s all. I’m _happy_.”

Nodding slightly, Jughead reaches over to take her hand. He shuffles a bit, and she does too, until they’re cuddled together on the river’s edge, looking west at the first streaks of pink and orange. Toledo is west of here, and so are Cleveland and Pittsburgh and Buffalo and all the points in between—but Jughead is not. He’s here, with her. 

The moment feels right. 

“Juggie?” Her heart thumps fast and true against her ribs as she turns around to look at him. “I have a question.” 

“Shoot.” 

“Will you marry me?” 

She watches confusion and then amusement flit across his face in rapid succession. Then his eyes meet hers, and he almost falters. 

“Oh,” he says. “You’re—you’re serious, Betty? You’re really proposing?”

Betty nods. “Forsythe Pendleton Jones—”

“ _Betty_ ,” he groans.

“—the third,” she finishes. “Quiet, Jug. Let me have this.” 

By now the corners of his mouth are curling upwards, the beginnings of the boyish grin he so rarely unleashes on the world. Betty’s heart surges even faster, and she finds herself swinging a leg across to straddle him. She places one hand on each of his shoulders, welcoming the soft, worn, familiar flannel under her palms. Jughead’s hands fit at the smallest part of her waist, and she likes that feeling too, the anchoring sensation of being held in just the right place. 

“I love you,” she says. “And I know we’re about to make some big changes in our lives. We can go slow. We don’t have to start planning a wedding right away, but—” She blinks away a happy tear that’s started welling in the corner of her eye. “I want to marry you. I want you forever, Jug.” 

He takes a deep, shuddering breath and lets it out slowly, his eyes never leaving her face. 

“Well,” he says, sounding much more shaken than she’d expected, “I can’t say no to _that_.” He swallows once, and adds, “Nor would I want to.” 

“So… yes?”

“Obviously, yes.” The grin is fully unleashed now, and Betty wonders if she’s ever seen him so open, so _relaxed_. “Yes, Betty Cooper, I will marry you.” 

They kiss until the sun has slipped all the way over the horizon. 

Eventually, Betty remembers the cupcakes.

  
  


On Tuesday night, he texts her a picture, sans caption: a thin, yellow gold band with a modest, round diamond in a cathedral setting. The ring is simple, classic; she knows a lot of people would call it boring. But when she imagines it on her finger, her heart leaps into her throat. 

_That’s it_ , she texts back. _I love it_. 

Three dots materialize almost at once, followed by the words _Good, because I already bought it._

She calls him at once. “I hope you didn’t spend too much, Jug.” 

“I spent what I wanted to spend,” he counters. “Also, I don’t think I’ve mentioned this yet, but I just found out I’m starting a pretty good job in about three weeks. Did you know it’s harder to negotiate salary when they already know you’ll take the position no matter what?” 

“Cheryl hinted as much,” she says. “Did she give you the fancy title?” 

“Associate Director, comma, Programs and Development. Nothing too fancy.” 

“It sounds good, though.” She wonders, briefly, if Cheryl will allow him to put _Jughead_ on a business card. 

“Yeah,” he says. “Doesn’t it?”

  
  


Two weeks later, she hears the telltale grumble of a U-Haul pulling into her driveway. Abandoning the papers she’s been grading at her kitchen table, she rushes outside; even though she hasn’t even bothered with shoes, Jughead’s already cut the engine and jumped out of the cab by the time she reaches the truck. 

“Hi,” she says, beaming at him. 

Before she can go in for the kiss, Jughead drops to one knee, pulling a little velvet box from his shirt pocket as he does so. He takes her in, from her currently very messy ponytail to her old denim shorts to the pink no-show socks on her feet, and beams right back. 

“Betty Cooper.” He opens the box. “Will you marry me?” 

“Of course,” she says. “It was my idea.” 

“Not _all_ the best ideas are yours, you know,” he counters. “You just said this one out loud first.” 

Before he slips the ring on her finger, he shows her the engraving on the inside, two small letters connected by one of her favorite punctuation marks: _B & J_. 

“I know it should be ‘E’ and ‘F,’ but I just couldn’t bear the thought of that,” he says, though not with any particular note of contrition. 

The ring slides on effortlessly, like it was meant to be there. But this isn’t fate, she reminds herself. This is the culmination of choices she’s made—choices they’ve both made—to be together, and to build their lives together, and to be happy. 

And she is. 

“So what do you think?” he asks as he stands up, sounding suddenly nervous even though there shouldn’t be any question about it; she’s already approved the ring, and if there’s ever a moment in her life she’s come close to literally glowing, now is it. 

Betty considers her words. 

“I think I’m really glad you decided to come find me, Jug,” she says. 

He slides his hands into her hair and tips her face up to his, but doesn’t kiss her just yet. 

“Me too, Betty Cooper,” he tells her. “Me too.”

  
  


  
  


_(fin)_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Despite the _fin_ , the chapter count is not a mistake. A coda is planned (has always been planned), and I hope it'll be finished in the next couple of weeks. 
> 
> Thank you for sticking with me on this fic, even as updates became somewhat sporadic. When you have a moment, I'd love to know what you thought. (And thanks to heartunsettledsoul and village-skeptic for their input. <3 you ladies.)


	12. Chapter 12

**MODERN LOVE: Finding Yourself in Someone Else’s Words**  
By J.F. Zielinski 

_What’s in a name?_ , Shakespeare once asked. 

The question has become a cliché for a reason. Not because we love flowers, although so many of us do. The question has gained cliché status because it resonates. _What’s in a name?_ you think, and you wonder: what if, _what if_ , you’d been named something else? 

Or, conversely—what if you were never named at all? 

Shakespeare isn’t responsible for every cliché in literature, after all. He wasn’t the first to realize that the characters to whom we most relate are the ones in whom we most see ourselves. 

Five years ago, I saw myself in this very space. That’s not a metaphor; I mean it literally. A girl—no, _the_ girl, _Cet obscur objet du désir_ —wrote about the relationship we never had in high school. You know _her_ name, if you’ve paid any attention whatsoever to the state of young adult fiction in the last three years: E.M. Cooper, though she’s always gone by Betty. _Maple Syrup Murder Town_ and its sequels. Those are hers. 

Even as I write the words, I can hear her chastising me. “Don’t plug my books in your column,” she says, with a gentle thwack to my shoulder. “This is yours.” 

She told me, once, that the problem with the first novel I published—the one I’d been trying to write since I was twenty-three—was that it was fundamentally an exploration of my relationship with my father, and yet, I kept trying to write myself out of the story. “Just lean into the _roman à clef_ aspects,” she said. She was right, of course. 

It’s a strange thing, to see yourself in someone else’s “Modern Love” column. She didn’t use my name. “The boy who wasn’t there,” she called me, and I wasn’t. I hadn’t been. But I read her column, and I saw myself, and I returned to her. It wasn’t a decision, it was a compulsion. She wrote a story, and I couldn’t rest until I knew the ending. 

As it turned out, the story hasn’t ended. I returned to her, and with her I remain. Two years to the day after she published her column, we got married. 

“Don’t tell them about our wedding,” Betty says now, rolling her eyes. “That belongs to us.” Of course, she’s right about that too. 

The stories I _could_ tell you, though. 

First, there was the absurd fight we had over whether our mutual childhood best friend would be on her side of the wedding party or mine; then, there was the chaos caused when her flame-haired maid of honor hooked up with my pink-haired best woman sometime in between the rehearsal and the rehearsal dinner; and finally, the minor panic _after_ all was said and done, when the other mirrored pair of bridesmaid and groomswoman hooked up in a very different, non-sexual way, and my sister announced she was departing with Betty’s for life in a commune that may or may not be a cult. 

(Thankfully, the taste for life mostly off the grid proved one that my sister could not fully acquire. She’s back in Toledo now, in our mother’s apartment instead of a maple-log longhouse, studying to become a tattoo artist. Though my mother hates tattoos, and so might disagree, it’s not the worst idea that my sister has ever had.) 

The blow-up between Betty’s parents, acrimoniously divorced, over which of them would walk her down the aisle. In the end, neither did: she came to me on her own. The biggest risk we took was opting for an outdoor ceremony at the end of September, but it paid off in spades. The maple leaves had just begun to turn, and when I saw her at the end of the aisle in her simple white dress, the sunlight that landed on her skin filtered through yellow and orange… 

As Betty would say, those thoughts belong to me. 

“You’re here,” she whispered, when she reached my side, holding the bouquet that she’d insisted I choose (much to the chagrin of both her mother and her maid of honor). 

“I’m here,” I replied. 

A few minutes later, our mutual childhood best friend took our rings from his son, our godson—not quite old enough to bear them on his own, but he toddled down the aisle in the care of his grandfather—and pronounced us husband and wife. Ever the master of actions simultaneously insane and practical, that was how Archie resolved the fight over whose side of the aisle he’d be on. “I want to be there for both of you,” he said. “Why don’t I just get ordained, and perform the ceremony?” 

(Betty and I locked eyes in mutual concern when he proposed this idea; Archie’s schemes have often, historically, gone awry. But this one worked.) 

We—the two of us specifically, not the more obtuse royal we—have been thinking about these things a lot lately. We’ve been thinking about names, and seeing yourself. We’ve been thinking about what it means to really be there. These are things everyone thinks about when they learn they’re going to have a child, I suppose. 

Though he didn’t walk her down the aisle, Betty’s father was in the front row, every bit the proud father, pompously stuffed into an ill-fitting suit. My own father was not. He would have been there if he could have been; though he was a notoriously unreliable man, of this, I’m certain. I like to think he would even have shaved and put on a tie for the occasion. 

I thought about my father a lot as I watched my own son grow inside Betty. We shared a lot of traits, he and I: dark hair, a predilection for restored motorcycles, a metabolism that mostly holds up regardless of the abuse we sling at it. 

We share a name, too. 

When Betty and I found out our child was going to be a boy, I rode my dad’s old motorcycle to his grave and sat there for a while, mindless of the dampness that soaked from the ground through my jeans. The name we share is a terrible one, inherited from _his_ father; what my great-grandparents were thinking when they came up with it, I’ll never know. 

“So,” Betty said quietly, when I returned hours later clutching the least-sad bouquet of zinnias our supermarket had to offer. She laid a hand on her still-flat stomach; I hadn’t told here where I was going, but she clearly knew. “Is he going to be the fourth?” 

I didn’t have an answer yet. My instinct was to say no. My instinct was to say that I had hoped we would have a girl, just so the issue could be avoided entirely. 

The first of my name, my grandfather, died not long after I was born; I have no memories of the man. By all accounts, he was a miserable, angry, abusive man who threw my sixteen-year-old father out of the house for being a rebellious and idiotic teenager, and lived just long enough to bestow upon me the insulting nickname I still stubbornly use. It’s arguably even worse than my legal name, but it feels more like mine than the real thing ever has. 

My own father wasn’t much better: he loved us, but often not as much as he loved cheap beer and cheaper whiskey, or the other members of his motorcycle gang. Even when he was physically present, he wasn’t really _there_. Not as he should have been. I told him that—or rather, I told his tombstone, indelibly marked with the name that is also mine. 

So often, this name has felt like a curse. That’s what I told Betty, who affected her thinking frown and said, rather vehemently, “If there ever was a curse, I think you’ve broken it.” This was followed almost immediately by, “Maybe you should talk to your mom.” 

In fact, I already had. I’d called her from the cemetery. “Betty’s pregnant,” I said, and then I waited for a reaction from a woman who’s spent most of her life trying not to have those. 

There was a long pause, as expected, but then my mother did the unheard of: she started crying. Happy tears, she said, even though I don’t think she’d shed a tear since she tore me and my sister out of her miserable marriage: not at either of our high school graduations, not at my college graduation, not at my wedding. 

(Later, I found out that this last one was a lie. She had in fact cried at the wedding, according to Betty’s mother; she’d wept profusely in the ladies’ room, away from all of us.) 

I won’t lie; her reaction threw me, especially when she paused, seemingly considering her words for a moment, and then asked if we’d gotten pregnant on purpose. 

Of course it was on purpose, I told her. In truth, we’d been trying for a couple of years: half-heartedly at first, figuring it would happen then if it was meant to happen then, but without any real sense of urgency. We were busy, after all. Sometimes Betty came home from school and declared she never wanted to see another child for as long as she lived; sometimes I came home from my job feeling the same way, and that was even before I added the part-time pursuit of a master’s in social work to a full-time nonprofit job and the (increasingly theoretical) writing of novels. 

How do you know you’re ready to become parents? We weren’t sure, not until Betty’s cycle arrived late one month and brought with it a melancholy that at first felt vaguely indefinable: the absence of someone you’ve never known. The absence of someone who hasn’t yet begun to exist. 

So yes, I said. We got pregnant on purpose. 

I imagined my mother nodding slightly, biting her tongue to keep from telling me what she never had, but which I always knew damn well: _my_ conception was anything but purposeful. 

The time didn’t seem right then, but she told me months later, when she came for a visit. Betty had just started to show, _really_ show, and my mother circled her warily, like she wasn’t sure whether it was all right to ask if she could try to feel the baby kicking. She _did_ ask if we had decided on a name yet, and Betty shook her head before shooting me one of the death glares she’d become quite good at lately, the one I got whenever I had a second (or third, or fourth) cup of caffeinated coffee that she was no longer allowed. 

“We haven’t,” Betty said, raising her eyebrow at me. 

I sighed, and my mother sighed, and our coffee cups hit the kitchen table in unison. 

“Your father got the name because his father was a narcissist,” she said, “and you got it because I was afraid.” 

She didn’t say what had been afraid of, but it was easy enough to figure out. My parents weren’t married then, and my father wasn’t exactly known for his fidelity. The name wasn’t supposed to bind me to him; it was supposed to bind him to us. 

“It worked,” my mother said. And then she said something I wasn’t expecting: “It didn’t need to. Your father would have done his best no matter what we named you.” 

In bed that night, Betty put my hand on her stomach. “For what it’s worth,” she said, “I’ve always liked your real name.” 

“Is that what you want to name him?” Somehow, I realized, I had never actually asked her. 

“I’m just saying,” she said. “If you wanted to. We’d find a cute nickname.” 

“Like I wound up with?” I demanded. 

She didn’t have an answer for that. The baby was quiet that night. I felt nothing. 

We entered the sixth month without a name. 

“Didn’t you have a list of future baby names picked out when you were a kid?” I asked Betty.

She shot me the second-cup-of-coffee glare, though I wasn’t drinking any at the time. “Did you?” 

In the seventh month, Betty started leaving lists around the house. She pinned lists to the corkboard in the upstairs office. We converted the third bedroom to a nursery, we sat through an intensely formal baby shower hosted by the formidable combination of Betty’s mother and her distant cousin, we verified maternity and paternity leaves and picked a pediatrician, and still, we had not decided. Did the absence of a decision mean that we had already made one? We couldn’t decide that, either. 

“If I had had a son,” Betty’s mother told us, eight months in, “I would have named him Charles. You can’t go wrong with something strong and classic, _Elizabeth_.” 

As the ninth month approached, Betty said, “Maybe we should just wait until he’s born. Maybe he’ll come out looking like…” She trailed off. We both knew no baby could possibly come out looking like that name. 

But then… 

Then, somehow, he did. Inasmuch as any infant looks like any name, I mean. He was as red-faced and squishy as every other newborn I’ve ever laid eyes on—but better, of course, because he was ours. 

And I realized the decision had been made a long time ago. 

My son deserves his own name, one untainted by whatever baggage I still carry. 

He’s not the fourth of anything. He’s the first. 

There’s a character in the third installment of _Maple Syrup Murder Town_ who resembles me, or the me I was at sixteen—a sardonic misanthrope, annoyed at most of the world most of the time, less misunderstood than he imagines himself to be. But something happens to him over the course of the novel: he falls in love. 

Not with a girl. Not at first, anyway. First, he falls in love with words. He lurks in the background, reading and writing and _changing_ ; halfway through the novel, he emerges from his flannel and denim chrysalis, and when our plucky heroine smiles shyly at him from across the cafeteria lunch table, he finds that his wings are ready to unfurl. Kafka’s _Metamorphosis_ , in reverse. 

This is what I hope for my son, I think: that when the time comes for him to fly, he’ll be ready to take off, towards the sun. He has a while to go. First, he needs to learn to hold his own head up.

“Your metaphor is completely incorrect, you know,” Betty tells me, when she reads over the rough draft of this essay. “Gregor Samsa wasn’t a butterfly, and even if he was, that’s not what the story was about. And I might teach English, not biology, but I’m pretty sure that’s not exactly how butterflies work. Also, you might want to reconsider your vague nod towards Icarus, that’s _really_ mixed—” 

She’s right, of course. But I’m leaving the metaphor in.

  
  
  
  


_J.F. Zielinski is the author of_ Vintage Triumph _. His second novel,_ The Glassmakers _, will be published next month._

____

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're out. Thanks to everyone who's walked beside me on this one, especially the indefatigable village-skeptic, who looked over parts of this coda for me. 
> 
> (ETA: I no longer remember who first coined the phrase "maple syrup murder town" re: Riverdale. I do know it wasn't me, and I hope whomever is responsible for it doesn't mind me borrowing it for this fic.) 
> 
> I'm going to miss this little universe.
> 
> If you're so inclined, I'd love for you to leave a comment <3.


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